



























C0PYK1GUT DEPOSIT. 











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Play Fair 


—John M. Cooper, D.D, 









CAMPING IN HOLY CROSS NATIONAL FOREST 
A small corner in one of the many great playgrounds and camps that God has given to us of America 





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JOHN M. COOPER, D.D. 

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The Catholic University of America 



THE CATHOLIC EDUCATION PRESS 
WASHINGTON. D. C. 

1923 




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imprimatur 


* MICHAEL J. CURLEY, D.D. 


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Archbishop of Baltimore 





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Copyright, 1923 
Catholic Education Press 


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PREFACE 


It is a very pleasant duty to express my gratitude 
and deep appreciation to Dr. Ernest Laplace, the Rev, 
Dr. William E. Degnan, the Rev. John F. White, and 
the Rev. Bro. Denis Edward, E.S.C., and his former 
colleagues of St. John’s College, Washington, who have 
helped me in many sections of the present volume; to 
my esteemed friend, Dr. John A. Lapp, upon whose 
broad knowledge and clear judgment in the field of 
civics I have largely drawn through personal confer¬ 
ences and through his published works; and in special 
manner to my friend and colleague, the Rev. Leo L. 
McVay of the Catholic LTniversity, for many hours out 
of a busy life and for a long list of invaluable criticisms 
and constructive suggestions generously and unselfishly 
given me. 

I am also greatly indebted to the Vechten Waring 
Co. for permission graciously granted to quote in chap¬ 
ter one from Col. Shields’ The Blanket Indian of the 
Northwest, and to the Macmillan Company for leave 
courteously given to quote in chapter twenty-five 
from McClintock’s The Old North Trail. I should 
like, too, to renew here the acknowledgments made in 
the text for the many courtesies extended me in the 
matter of photos for illustrations by a number of the 
federal departments and branches thereof, by many 
private organizations, and by generous friends. 




CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Your Age, Weight, and Height. 1 

II. The Greatest Leader Who Ever Lived. 11 

III. A Helping Hand to the Sick. 20 

IV. Going Shares. 32 

V. Welcoming the Stranger. 42 

VI. Service by Counsel. 51 

VII. Good Turns. 60 

VIII. Teamwork. 66 

IX. Friendliness. 72 

X. Trustworthiness. 80 

XI. Honor. 87 

XII. The Square Deal. 97 

XIII. The Flag of Justice. 104 

XIV. Your Health.'. 114 

XV. The Other Fellow’s Health. 124 

XVI. Home. 133 

XVII. Family Life. 137 

XVIII. Purity. 144 

XIX. Play. 154 

XX. Your Life-Work. 164 

XXL Education. 174 

XXII. Liberty. 181 

XXIII. Courage. 190 

XXIV. Our Father. 199 

XXV. Reverence. 208 

XXVI. Catholics and Their Church. 219 

XXVII. Americans and Their Government. 228 

XXVIII. Loyalty. 239 

vii 







































CHAPTER I 

' • 

Your Age, Weight, and Height 

“Do you mean to tell me that a man can run a 
hundred miles in twenty-four hours, on snowshoes, 
and another hundred in the next twenty-four hours, and 
another hundred in the next?” 

“I did it.” 

It was the famous Sioux chief, Rain-in-the-Face, who 
answered. His name may make us smile, and some 
things in his war record may make us frown. But he 
could run. He had been trained to long-distance 
running by his father from early boyhood. 

He had killed two white men—in self-defense, he 
claimed. He fled, was captured, and was locked under 
guard in a log hut. He escaped at night in the heart 
of the northern winter and in the midst of a driving 
blizzard with the temperature 40 below zero. For 
three days and three nights he ran, without sleeping, 
without resting even to eat. As he approached his 
friends’ camp at the end of his 300-mile run, he col¬ 
lapsed, fell unconscious, and did not come to for forty- 
eight hours. 

Walking and trotting, you can cover about five miles 
an hour, can’t you? Now, if you followed the Lincoln 
Highway from New York City to San Francisco, a 
distance of 3,305 miles, and walked and trotted day and 
night without stopping, it would take you, at the rate of 
five miles an hour or 120 miles a day, twenty-seven and 
a half days to cover the whole distance. Day and 
night pace for nearly a month would, you will admit, 
be a little strenuous! You would probably be satisfied 

l 


2 


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with four hours’ traveling or twenty miles a clay. Even 
this is farther than an army on the march goes each day. 
At this rate of twenty miles a day, if you started from 
New York on the Fourth of July, you would not get to 
San Francisco until more than five months later, that is, 
just a few days before Christmas. 

If all the 105,700,000 people in the United States 
were posted along the same route, there would be a 
town of more than 6,000 inhabitants for every thousand 
feet. You would be passing through densely built-up 
streets every minute of the time. If all the 300,000,000 
Catholics in the world were posted likewise, we could 
not manage at all, for there would have to be a small 
city of more than 17,000 inhabitants to every thousand 
feet. Suppose that, instead, we line up our Catholics 
on both sides of the ocean-to-ocean trail. They would 
then, standing with shoulder to shoulder, be massed 
seventeen deep to both your right and your left as you 
passed along, throughout the whole route. You should 
have to jump high to get even a glimpse of the green 
fields beyond them. 

You know, of course, of the great Yale Bowd. It will 
seat nearly 75,000 people for a big football game. To 
seat all the 300,000,000 Catholics in the world, how 
many such gigantic bowls would be required ? Seventy- 
five goes into three hundred four times. Would four 
bowls be enough? Would forty? Would four hun¬ 
dred? Or would we need—how many? 

* As an American and as a Catholic, you belong to two 
big things. As an American, you belong to the biggest 
country in the New World. As a Catholic, you belong 
to the biggest church in the world. These two things 
are not only big, but they are growing, awake, alive. 

The United States is still young, a boy in years among 


YOUR AGE, WEIGHT, AND HEIGHT 


3 


the great nations but a man in strength. No civilized 
nation in history has grown as she has grown. 

Nearly three centuries rolled by after the discovery 
of America by Christopher Columbus on October 12, 
1492, before our American republic was born. They 
were the centuries of the great discoverers and pioneers, 
and, as you know, many of these pioneers were Catholic 



(g) Underwood and Underwood, N. Y. 


A FOOTBALL GAME IN THE YALE BOWL 

How many such bowls would you need to seat all the people in the United 
States? All the Catholics in the world? 


missionaries. There were Men, with a capital M, hardy, 
fearless, liberty-loving, men of all nations. Columbus 
himself, though an Italian, sailed under the flag of 
Spain. From Spain, and France, and England, and 
Ireland, and Holland, and Germany, and Sweden came 
most of these early pioneers and colonists. Some 
sought gold, some sought liberty. Few found gold, 




4 


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but all found hard work, perils, and in the end liberty. 
It was an uphill fight and growth was slow at first. 

When the Liberty Bell at Philadelphia rang out the 
good news of the Declaration of Independence on July 
4, 1776, there were in all the thirteen original colonies,— 
the number still symbolized in the thirteen stripes of 
our flag,—only about as many people, 1,850,000, as 
there are in the single city of Philadelphia to-day. Even 
a quarter century later, when just a few days before the 
century died, George Washington passed away at 
Mount Vernon on the Potomac, there were only about 
five and a half million people in the whole United 
States, fewer than are living in the single city of New 
York to-day. 

During the last hundred years, since 1820, we have 
grown as a nation from less than ten millions to one 
hundred and five millions, not including more than 
twelve millions in our possessions in the Philippines, 
Porto Rico and elsewhere. This growth has largely 
been due to the great waves of immigration which have 
swept from Europe to our hospitable shores. During 
the first seven decades of these hundred years, from 
1820 to 1890, by far the majority of the newcomers 
hailed from northern and western Europe, from Eng¬ 
land, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Sweden, Norway 
and Denmark. For the last three decades since 1890, 
a rapidly increasing majority have come to us from 
central, southern, and eastern Europe, chiefly Italians, 
Russians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Czecho-Slovaks 
Jugo-Slavs, with a good sprinkling of folks from the 
eastern end of the Mediterranean region, and from 
elsewhere. 

All have come to accept the freedom and opportunity 
that America generously offers them. All have brought 



NEW AMERICANS AT ELLIS ISLAND 

Our American population has grown mainly from the incoming stream of 
newcomers, young and old, from Europe, who have brought their gifts of 
brain and muscle to help build our nation 

tilings else, young, live, strong, and hardy. All things 
human, from home-run wizards to world empires, grow 
old, lose their grip, and die. But she lives on ever 
robust, ever able to “come back.'’ She has found 
what Ponce de Leon failed to find, the fountain of 
youth. Yet not she, but her Founder who lives within 
her. “I am with you all days even to the consumma¬ 
tion of the world.” 


YOUR AGE, WEIGHT, AND HEIGHT 5 

their gifts of brain and muscle to help build up America. 
On the coat-of-arms of the United States is the motto: 
“E Pluribus Unumout of many, one! Out of many 
States, one Nation. We are also one people blended 
from many races and tongues. The blood of the races 
of the world flows through the veins of America. 

The Catholic Church is old in years, but young in all 


Courtesy of T. V. Potvdorly 




6 


PLAY FAIR 


Have you ever heard of Father Damien, missionary 
to the lepers, and martyr too, for he died of the dread 



Courtesy of U. 8. Forest Service 


“GRIZZLY GIANT” 

All living tilings grow old, even giant Sequoias, the oldest living 

things in the world 


disease, the most terrible of all human diseases? In 
its last stages, the very flesh drops from the fingers of 





YOUR AGE, WEIGHT, AND HEIGHT 


7 


the victims. On Molokai, one of the Hawaiian Islands, 
the government established a leper settlement. Food 
and clothing were given the unfortunate victims, but 
nurses and physicians could not at first be found who 
would stay with the lepers. Father Damien, a Belgian 
by birth, eagerly volunteered his services. He arrived 
in 1873. As priest, he looked after all the religious 
needs of the lepers, said Mass for them, gave them the 
sacraments. But he did more. He dressed and 
bandaged their ulcers. He helped to cheer them up. 
He lent a hand in building their little cottages. He 
even dug their graves, made their coffins, and buried 
them with his own hands. Every day was a perpetual 
good turn and work of mercy. For fifteen years this, 
was the life he lived. He kept it up until he died, even 
during the last three years of his life, after he had 
caught the loathsome and deadly disease himself. 

Who, do you think, is his successor in this far-away 
Pacific island? An American Catholic ex-army officer, 
American to the core and Catholic to the point of 
heroism, Brother Joseph Dutton, still young in all but 
years. Though so far away from home on his plague- 
stricken island in the Pacific, and though his duties do 
not leave him much time for recreation, he reads Amer¬ 
ican newspapers—when he can get them—with as keen 
an interest as if he lived in New York City, and, from 
what I know of him, I think he goes pretty deeply into 
the news on the sporting page! 

Father Damien and Brother Dutton are good ex¬ 
amples of the Catholic missionary spirit. Today an 
army of priests, brothers, sisters, and catechists of about 
82,000 are engaged in Catholic missionary work. Of 
course, a few only of them are laboring among lepers. 
The others are scattered over the globe, from the lands 


8 


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of ice and snow to the dripping jungles of the tropics. 
All are working in the spirit of Father Damien and 
Brother Dutton. “How long are you going to stay?” 
a group of sisters on their way to the missions in the 
Philippines were asked. “Until we die,” the} 7 
answered. 

By the way, do you know that the Catholic Church 
in the United States has within the last several years 
pushed ahead with lightning speed toward doing its 



Courtesy of Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions 


ALASKAN MISSIONARY’S EIGHTEEN DOG-POWER FLIVVER 

Our Catholic missionaries among the Indians and Eskimo of Alaska travel 
hundreds of miles yearly by dog-sled 

part in foreign missions? During 1921, more than a 
hundred Catholic missionaries—priests, sisters, and 
brothers—went forth from the United States to Asia, 
Africa, Oceanica, and the West Indies to spread the 
gospel of Christ. Forty-five went to China alone, eight 
to the Philippines, New Guinea and the Polynesian 
Isles. One training school for missionaries, Mary knoll 
on the Hudson River, is crowded to its very limit with 
nearly three hundred candidates, although it is only 


YOUR AGE, WEIGHT, AND HEIGHT 


9 


ten years old. Yet, a few years ago, people said that 
American boys were too much interested in making 
money to offer themselves for carrying the light of faith 
and service to lands beyond the sea. 

By this time, you are perhaps asking: “What have 
missions to do with the growth of the Church ?” You 
have answered your own question. It is by missions 
and missionaries that the Church has grown. Nineteen 
hundred years ago the Catholic Church began her life. 
She had just thirteen members to begin with, just as 
the United States began its life with thirteen states. 
These members were Mary, the Mother of Our Lord, 
and the twelve Apostles, the twelve first missionaries 
chosen by Our Lord Himself when He lived on earth. 

A small number, not much larger than your gang or 
baseball or football team. But the number grew. 
The early Church spread first around the shores of the 
Mediterranean Sea within the lifetime of the first 
missionaries, the Apostles. Thence within five or six 
centuries she spread out farther like a great fan over 
parts of Asia and Northern Africa and over the greater 
part of Europe. Our ancestors in Europe, then mostly 
uncivilized barbarians, were baptized and they passed 
on the blessings of faith to succeeding generations, and 
to us of the twentieth century. 

With the opening up of the Orient and the discovery 
of America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the 
torch of faith was carried across the Atlantic to our 
American shores. Most of the Indians of North and 
South America became Catholic, though many of the 
missionaries such as Father Brebeuf and Father Jogues 
suffered martyrdom or worse. In America as elsewhere 
the* blood of the martyrs has been the seed of the 
Church. 


10 


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Nowhere has the Church grown more rapidly and 
more remarkably than in the United States. One 
hundred and twenty years ago, there were only about 
36,000 Catholics in the United States. Today there 
are about 19,000,000, more than five hundred times as 
many, to say nothing of the additional 10,000,000 
Catholics in the United States possessions, especially 
the Philippine Islands and Porto Rico. 

You belong to two big and growing societies. But 
big numbers are not everything. They are not the 
most important thing. What do the big numbers 
stand for and do? This is the most important thing. 
This little book has been written to help you know what 
America and the Catholic Church stand for and do, to 
help you get into the big game yourself, play your 
part on the team, and win. 


CHAPTER II 

The Greatest Leader Who Ever Lived 

Several years ago I saw an odd accident a very short 
distance from where I am now writing. An open elec¬ 
tric car was forging its way up a steep hill. I noticed 
the motorman lean far out to his left to adjust some¬ 
thing and evidently his head struck a center pole 
standing between the tracks. While badly stunned, 
lie kept his feet, though he swayed from side to side as 
the car approached the terminus of the line fifty yards 
ahead. Half unconscious, he had lost control of his 
car. On and on the car came, and at full speed smashed 
into a terminal pole holding up many wires. * The pole 
toppled over and crashed down on the car, and in a 
moment live wires were sizzling in all directions on the 
ground. Within five seconds after the motorman lost 
control, the smash came. 

You can’t run an electric car without a motorman,' 
alert, with his hand on the controller. If you should 
try, the end is a sure smash-up. And you can't run 
any organization, from a baseball team to a nation, 
from a gang to a world-wide church, without some one 
at the steering-gear, without a leader, call him captain, 
president, or pope. If you should try, your organiza¬ 
tion would soon smash to bits. 

What kind of a leader do we expect and want? I 
think we should all agree that some of the things we 
expect in a leader are unselfishness, fairness, courage, 
resourcefulness, and the knack of winning out and 
making good. 

A square captain of a team plays no favorites. He 

11 


12 


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puts a man in a position as guard or tackle or shortstop 
on the man’s merits and ability, not because of favorit¬ 
ism and special liking for him. Every man on the 
team is treated the same, that is, is assigned to hold 
down a position in accordance with his ability to make 
good. Theodore Roosevelt who led the American 
people for so many years had begun by standing for the 
square deal in promoting the men under him. AMien 
he was elected Police Commissioner of New York City, 
he found promotions largely going by bribery and 
favoritism, under the direction of corrupt political 
bosses. He set the policy of giving jobs on merit and 
merit only. 

“The old guard dies. It never surrenders!” This 
was the motto of Napoleon’s bodyguard. One of the 
things that had inspired this heroic loyalty was that 
Napoleon, with all his faults, had the spirit of great 
leadership and was fair and just and impartial with the 
soldiers under him. He promoted on merit, not on 
personal favoritism. 

We expect a leader to be on the level, to be fair, to 
treat squarely all who follow him, to play no favorites, 
and to give credit where and only where credit is due. 

One of the greatest soldier leaders of all time was 
strangely enough, a woman and a saint, Joan of Arc. 
When only eighteen years old, she went to the French 
king, who was a weak, spineless, useless sort of fellow, 
and volunteered to lead his then broken and beaten 
army to victory. People laughed at her, at the idea of 
a mere slip of a country girl leading to victory an army 
of brawny thugs, bullies and cut-throats, as the hired 
soldiers of that army were. But clad in her white 
armor and astride her white charger she won her 
victory, and laid the foundations of the French nation. 


THE GREATEST LEADER WHO EVER LIVED 13 

And after she had done all this she asked no reward but 
to be permitted to return to her village, her home, her 
folks, and her spinning wheel. 

We expect a leader to be loyal to the cause and to 
work not for rewards for himself, but for love of his 
men and of his cause. He will ask his followers often 
to do hard things and to brave dangers and suffering. 
This is part of the game. But we expect him to be 
willing to rough it with his followers, to share their 
sufferings, their struggles, and their sacrifices, and to 
ask them to do nothing he would be unwilling to do 
himself. 

When most people thought the earth was flat instead 
of spherical, it took courage to sail straight across the 
unknown and uncharted Atlantic. Who knew but at 
the edge of the flat ocean, you would fall off into space, 
as a canoe falls over the brink of a waterfall. Colum¬ 
bus and the men who sailed with him were brave men. 
But when the days and weeks passed and still no land 
hove in sight, the courage of even the bravest began to 
fail—the courage of all but one, Columbus himself. 
And it was his courage and his confidence of victory 
that carried the crews he led over the days of dis¬ 
couragement and mutiny to the promised land of the 
Indies. 

We expect a leader to be courageous and brave, and 
to have confidence and trust and hope and cheerfulness 
in the outcome of his cause. No football team wants a 
captain who gets cold feet on the eve of the big game 
of the season. 

Nor does any team want to work under a coach who 
does not know his business. Would you? Or how 
would you like to go out for a year’s camping trip into 
the Rockies or into Alaska under the leadership of a 



14 


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(g) Underwood and Underwood, N. T. 

THE GREATEST AMERICAN LEADER 


Can you read character in faces? What qualities of a leader can you 

read in this face? 



THE GREATEST LEADER WHO EVER LIVED 15 

man who had never been outside his own city ward 
and who w r ould not know how to make a fire in wet 
weather? One reason why our men worked and fought 
so successfully under leaders like Pershing, Benson and 
Foch in the late war was their full confidence in the 
resourcefulness and ability of their leaders. Benson 
and Foch, by the way, are, as you probably know, very 
practical and loyal Catholics. 

We expect a leader to be resourceful, to know his 
work, to be keen, awake, alert, far-sighted, a man who 
can plan intelligently on a large scale. 

Washington at Valley Forge in 1777, and Washington 
at Yorktown in 1781! What a contrast! The men of 
the ragged army at Valley Forge sometimes for a week 
at a time had nothing to eat but frozen potatoes. Some¬ 
times they were obliged to sleep by turns on the frozen 
ground as there were not enough blankets to go round. 
While some slept, the others crowded around the 
campfires. Scarcely a man escaped being frostbitten, 
and many a foot and leg froze black and had to be 
amputated. In the midwinter nearly one-fifth of the 
men were without shoes. Nearly a third or fourth of 
the men died before the winter was over. And worst 
of all perhaps, patriotism among the comfortable 
civilian population was almost dead. Who but a 
leader like Washington could have kept together this 
shattered and tattered remnant and out of it built the 
army that at last triumphed and won for us Americans 
independence and liberty? 

We expect a leader to get results, to dare great things, 
to take risks, to achieve, to win, to snatch victory out 
of the very jaws of defeat. 

History has known many leaders in war and peace. 
Some leaders have been far-famed for fair play, some 


16 


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for loyalty and unselfishness, some for brains and re¬ 
sourcefulness, some for daring and courage, some for 
their genius in turning defeat into victory. There is 
one Leader and only one who combines all these things 
in the supreme degree. And that Leader is your leader 
and mine, our ever fair, unselfish, resourceful, courage¬ 
ous and victorious Leader, the divine Son of God, 
Jesus Christ. 

On the sky line of history loom up the magic figures 
of great leaders and empire builders, Alexander the 
Great, Augustus, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Na¬ 
poleon. But where are their empires now? And who 
to-day follows their leadership, or even stops to do their 
memories reverence? 

Even were we to view from the merely human stand¬ 
point, as did the non-Catholic historian, Macaulay, the 
vast empire planned and built by your great Leader 
and mine, can any human empire compare with it? 
Read what Macaulay wrote: 

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a 
work of human policy so well deserving of examination 
as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that 
Church joins together the two great ages of human 
civilization. No other institution is left standing 
which carries the mind back to the times when the 
smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when 
cameleopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian am¬ 
phitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of 
yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme 
Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series 
from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nine¬ 
teenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the 
eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august 
dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. 


THE GREATEST LEADER WHO EVER LIVED 17 

The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But 
the republic of Venice was modern when compared 
with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, 
and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in 
decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and useful 
vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to 
the farthest end of the world missionaries as zealous as 
those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still con¬ 
fronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which 
she confronted Attila. The number of her children 
is greater than in any former age. 

“Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the 
term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw 
the commencement of all the governments and of all 
the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the 
world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined 
to see the end of them all. She was great and re¬ 
spected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before 
the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian elo¬ 
quence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still 
worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still 
exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from 
New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take 
his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch 
the ruins of St. Paul’s.” 

What leader but yours and mine could have had the 
courage to dare, the genius to plan, and the power to 
carry to victory the world-wide, ever-enduring, ever¬ 
growing, invincible Catholic Church? 

When He lived among us, He braved enraged mobs 
and mighty and treacherous rulers, with never a quiver 
of fear. Boldly and intrepidly He defied bodily threats 
and peril of death in the cause of truth and kindliness 
and principle. He faced death, and died for loyalty to 



18 


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a principle, loyalty to the truth He teaches us, and 
loyalty to the love He bears each one of us. 

It seemed for a brief three days after His death on 
the cross that His clever, wily, underhand, powerful 
enemies had finally won out. So they thought, 
Caiaphas, Pilate, and the rest of that cowardly crew. 
To make doubly sure, after the great round stone had 



(g) Scenic America Company, Portland, Oreg, Courtesy ot National Park Service 

A ROCKY ASCENT 

“Sometimes He takes us on steep climbs up rough trails” 


been rolled across the door of the tomb cut in the solid 
rock of the hillside, they sealed the stone and set a 
guard of heavily armed soldiers on watch day and 
night. “Now, at last we have fixed Him,” they 
thought. But how easily they were outwitted, soldiers 
and all of them. 

Victory! A victory more glorious than human 



THE GREATEST LEADER WHO EVER LIVED 


19 


imagination could have fancied, victory over death 
itself and over those who had planned and schemed His 
death, broke like the sun after a storm on that first 
Easter morn. “Why seek ye the living among the 
dead?” spoke the Angel of the Resurrection to Mary 
Magdalen and the other Mary. “ He is risen, He is not 
here, behold the place where they laid Him.” 

He is our supreme Commander, our great Leader, 
living, kindly, fair, courageous, resourceful, victorious. 
Sometimes He takes us on steep climbs up rough trails. 
Sometimes He asks us to do things and to shoulder re¬ 
sponsibilities that put our mettle, our manhood, our 
courage, and our loyalty to the test. Rut He is a 
Leader who never asks us to do what He has not done, 
to bear what He has not borne, to go where He has not 
gone. At the end of the long trail, we shall perhaps 
be a little tired, but we shall laugh over and forget the 
sweating work of the day when the night of death comes, 
and we pitch our Last Camp. 


CHAPTER III 

A Helping Hand to the Sick 

Do you know the story of John R. Kissinger and 
John J. Moran? Everyday names, but not everyday 
men. They are two American men worth knowing. 
Both happened to be in Cuba after the Spanish-Amer- 
ican war of 1898, Kissinger as a private in the Army 
Hospital Corps, Moran as a civilian employe. 

If today, the dreaded yellow fever or Yellow Jack is 
practically a thing of the past, we may largely thank 
the cool heroism of these two men, and the brave and 
untiring researches carried out under conditions of 
grave danger by a small group of our American army 
surgeons, under the immediate leadership of Major 
Walter Reed. 

Yellow Jack has been one of the most terrible scourges 
of the American continent. At Philadelphia, for in¬ 
stance, in 1793, one-tenth of the whole population died 
of it. In 1878, another epidemic which spread to a 
great number of cities, carried off nearly 16,000 people. 
The disease strikes silently and quickly. The skin turns 
yellow, the temperature rises rapidly, delirium sets in 
and death, occurring in some epidemics in four out of 
every five cases, soon puts an end to the victim’s agony. 

Great mystery shrouded for centuries the cause of 
the disease. It remained for the little group of four 
American Army surgeons, headed by Major Walter 
Reed—one of America’s greatest men—to do the 
scientific detective work that finally proved the mos¬ 
quito to be the carrier of the disease, to be the villain in 
the case. 

20 


A HELPING HAND TO THE SICK 


21 


These men started their studies in and near Havana 
in June, 1900. In the course of their dangerous work, 
two of the group, Dr. Carroll and Dr. Lazear caught the 
fever. Dr. Carroll recovered, but Dr. Lazear died. 
Before the fall of 1900, it had become pretty clear that 
the mosquito was the guilty party. But a test had to 
be made to make sure. 

Kissinger and Moran volunteered their services in 
the cause. They let themselves be bitten by mos¬ 
quitoes that had sucked the blood of yellow fever 
patients. Both were stricken with the disease. Happily, 
both recovered, and, the last I heard, were still living. 
War on the mosquito was declared. Breeding pools 
were filled or covered with a film of mosquito oil. 
Yellow jack disappeared, and, let us hope, for good. 

Kissinger and Moran were offered a reward in money 
before undergoing their heroic test. Both refused. 
They risked their lives coolly and deliberately for the 
sake of their fellowmen. They wanted no pay for 
their heroic good turn. Perhaps, too, they were think¬ 
ing of Him who said: Lay up to yourselves treasures in 
heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth con¬ 
sume, and where thieves do not break through and 
steal. 

The story of Kissinger and Moran calls up also the 
story of another great modern man. From time to 
time, you hear or read in the newspaper of a child 
bitten by a mad dog and taken to the hospital for the 
Pasteur treatment, as a precaution against rabies or 
hydrophobia, one of the most terrible and fatal of all 
diseases. 

Louis Pasteur was one of the most famous scientists 
of our time, and a fine Catholic man. And, it may be 
added, the first man to introduce the Pasteur treat- 


22 


PLAY FAIR 


ment for hydrophobia into the United States was also 
a Catholic physician, Dr. Ernest Laplace, a prominent 
surgeon in Philadelphia, who is still alive and active. 

It was Pasteur, “the greatest master of all,” one of 
the greatest scientists of all time, as well as one of the 
greatest of all human benefactors, who once said: 
“The more I know, the more nearly is my faith that of 
the Breton peasant. Could I but know all I would 
have the faith of a Breton peasant woman.” Religion 
and science should be the best of friends. 

By his epoch-making researches in his laboratory at 
Paris, Pasteur discovered, among many other things, a 
cure for hydrophobia, thereby saving thousands of lives 
and preventing untold suffering of the most acute and 
horrible kind. This was only a very small fraction of 
his work. The methods and principles he demon¬ 
strated have since his time been made use of to discover 
preventives and cures for many of the most dreaded 
diseases that afflict mankind. History will know him 
as the father of modern medicine. 

Pasteur did not work for money. He worked for 
love of man and God. His biographer tells us that as 
his last end drew near, he was happy in the thought 
that he had lived and worked for the service of his 
fellowmen and that his life-work would help save 
legions of human lives and prevent unmeasured human 
suffering, especially among children, Christ’s least 
brethren. 

“I was sick, and you visited Me.” Our Lord did not 
mean, of course, that the only thing we should do for 
sick people or for those who have met with accidents is 
to visit them. He meant that we should do all we 
could for them, to help them get well, and to do all we 
can to keep people from getting sick or meeting with 


A HELPING HAND TO THE SICK 


23 


accidents. By the way, what do you know about First 
Aid and Safety First work? Would it fit in here? 

You remember the story of the Good Samaritan. A 
man was going down the steep road which leads from 
Jerusalem to Jericho. Highwaymen held him up, 
stripped him, stole his money, beat him, and left him 
half dead on the roadside. A good-hearted Samaritan 
saw him, stopped, bandaged him, gave him first aid, 
and carried him into the nearest town, just as you would 
do to-day in the same case. “ Go, and do in like man¬ 
ner,” is Our Lord’s charge to us. Open the gospel at 
nearly any page, and you will find an account of some 
cure or other worked by Our Lord Himself. The sick 
He never turned away, no matter how late the hour 
nor how tired He was from His long hours of work, 
prayer and travel. He was never too tired or too busy 
to help the sick. • 

Indeed, so important did Our Lord consider kindness 
to the sick that when He sent out His disciples to preach 
the gospel, He laid upon them as their second most 
urgent task the command: Heal the sick. He did not 
stop at that. In fact, He instituted, as you know, a 
special sacrament for the sick, Extreme Unction, to be 
given to all His followers to the end of the world, in 
case of serious illness or danger of death. 

When a Catholic is taken ill, two people are always 
sent for at once, the priest and the doctor. The priest 
hears the sick person’s confession, gives him Holy 
Viaticum, and finally anoints him with consecrated oil 
on the eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, hands and feet. 
Every priest, and any sick person who has been anointed 
and has recovered, can tell you how peaceful and con¬ 
tented and happy the sacraments of the sick make the 
patient feel. Extreme Unction, too, gives bodily strength 


24 


PLAY FAIR 


to help and hasten recovery, if it be God’s will that the 
person recover. Besides, if the sick person be uncon¬ 
scious and unable therefore to make his confession, 
there is good reason to believe that Extreme Unction 
will take the place of confession itself. 

In First Aid work, you are trained to keep cool and 
send at once, in case of serious accident or illness, for 
the doctor. By all means do so. But be sure to send 
for the priest too, if the victim be a Catholic or if you 
are in doubt about his religion. Take no chances. 
The man’s eternity may depend on you. The physician 
of the soul and the physician of the body work hand in 
hand, and both are needed. 

No people has probably ever fallen so low or become 
so animal-like as not to cherish some kindness for the 
sick. Several years ago I had to attend an Indian girl 
who was dying of tuberculosis in the Canadian woods 
at the headwaters of the St. Maurice River near the 
Hudson Bay divide. The tribe w T as an extremely 
backward and poor one, yet a blind man could see the 
tenderness and affectionate care which she received 
from all the tribe, up to her last breath. Among some 
primitive peoples, however, among even some of our 
American Indians, it has been a not uncommon custom 
to put to death the gravely ill. One African tribe, for 
instance, the Wakikuyu, takes the sick man or woman 
outside the village, lights a fire near and leaves a little 
food, and abandons the victim to the hyenas that prowl 
about in the night. 

Even among the great civilized peoples of Our Lord’s 
time, the Greeks and Romans, homes for the sick, like 
our hospitals, were almost if not quite unknown. 
Hospitals are a Christian invention of mercy. The 
Topes have been their greatest friends, as they have 


A HELPING HAND TO THE SICK 


25 


been the greatest friends of medical research into the 
causes and cures of disease. One of the oldest of the 
large modern hospitals is that of the Holy Spirit, within 
a slingshot throw of St. Peter’s and the Vatican at 
Rome. Many of the earlier hospitals were entrusted 



Courtesy of St. Vincent’s Hospital, N. Y. C. 


OPERATING IN A CATHOLIC HOSPITAL 

Religion and science work hand in hand to save human life and relieve 

human suffering 

to the religious orders and to some of the orders of 
knights, whose members served as nurses and doctors. 
Some of the religious orders, like the Sisters of Charity, 
were founded for the express purpose of serving the 
sick without pay and for the pure love of God and man. 
The first hospital in the New World was founded in 








26 


PLAT FAIR 


the City of Mexico as early as 1524. What a growth 
since that time! Today there are more than 600 
Catholic hospitals in the United States alone. 

Quite a-record of good turns, you will say. And we 
have said nothing of the Catholic homes for the insane, 
the mentally sick; nor of the twenty or more different 



Fainting by S. Seymour Thomas 


AN INNOCENT VICTIM 
A war-time service of the religious orders 


orders of Sisters in the United States, who go out into 
the homes of the poor to nurse the ill; nor of the work 
of sisters in epidemics and in wars. 

The Catholic hospitals in the United States and 
Canada give treatment to about four million patients 
each year, as many people as there were soldiers in our 
war-time Army. About twenty thousand sisters are 
serving the sick in these hospitals. 





A HELPING HAND TO THE SICK 


27 


Nor have we mentioned the Catholic homes for the 
incurable, for those suffering from the White Plague, 
for the convalescents—all so many great living works 
of mercy to the sick. Before passing on, I wish to tell 
you a little of a wonderful new plan for looking after the 
great number of people, particularly those not wealthy, 
who are sick but not sick enough to be sent to a room 
or ward in the hospital. I speak of what we now call 
outpatient departments of hospitals. Some call them 
clinics or, by an old name, dispensaries. 

I visited one in a Catholic hospital of a city of the 
Middle West just recently. It is a series of about a 
dozen small rooms with a large airy central lobby, 
attached to and a part of the hospital. In each room 
a certain group of diseases is treated by a specialist. 
The patients are living at home, not in the hospital. 
They come on fixed days and at fixed hours. For a 
trifling sum, or entirely free if they can afford nothing, 
they are given a thorough physical examination to 
find out what is wrong, and are then treated by the 
best available specialist. This means the extension of 
the best specialist’s services in the city to the poorest 
and most needy. Social workers are attached to the 
outpatient department who prevent fraud and who 
visit the patients in their homes so far as is necessary. 
This one hospital treats about 150 outpatients a day, 
thus giving about 45,000 treatments in the course of 
the year. 

The old Roman and Greek governments did little 
for the sick, as we have seen. What a contrast to our 
own government! In America, we have no state 
religion. This does not, of course, mean that the 
American people or the American government is in¬ 
different to religion or to Christianity. In fact, many 


28 


PLAY FAIR 


of our finest things are due to Christian influence, and 
none more than American care of and achievements 
for the sick. 

Hospitals of all kinds dot our land. Physicians for 
the poor and trained nurses who go into the homes of 
the needy sick are provided by our communities, while 
volunteer organizations like the Red Cross, or local 
visiting nurses’ associations are doing a work as glorious 
as has ever been done by a people in the fight with 
disease and suffering. Later on, we shall touch on the 
magnificent battle being carried on by our federal and 
local public health services. Here we shall only speak 
of the government’s fight with and victory over some 
of the contagious and infectious maladies. 

Panama, prior to 1904, was a deadly pesthole. 
Malaria and yellow fever made it unlivable. General, 
then Colonel, Gorgas cleaned it up so thoroughly that 
today the Panama Canal Zone is as healthy as a 
mountain village. Without such a clean-up, it would 
probably not have been possible to build the Panama 
Canal. 

Smallpox was formerly rampant in Cuba, Pprto Rico, 
and the Philippines, as it used to be in the United 
States. George Washington carried the marks of the 
disease to his grave. Since the beginning of this cen¬ 
tury, American military surgeons have practically rid 
our possessions of it, by the simple process of universal 
vaccination. 

During an early epidemic as many as 30,000 people 
had died in Manila on one day from Asiatic cholera. 
The city is now free from it. Another great fight was 
made in Manila against the terrible bubonic plague. 
It is carried by fleas that live on rats. The rats were 
largely exterminated. The plague died out. 


A HELPING HAND TO THE SICK 


c 2 9 


In the Spanish-American War, 86% of all our men 
who died* died of typhoid fever. Since 1911, all 
soldiers have been vaccinated against typhoid, with 
the result that the disease has practically disappeared 
from the army. In the recent war, its occurrence 
among our four million soldiers was so rare as to be 
negligible. 

Our Public Health Service is today carrying on an 
unremitting fight with pellagra and hookworm, with 
the White Plague, with the loathsome diseases resulting 
usually from immorality, and with other plagues, and is 
meeting with a success of which we can all be proud. 
They are uprooting these diseases just as the Church 
uprooted leprosy in Western civilization. The Health 
Service is moreover a sentinel ever on duty, ever on 
the watch at seaports and other strategic points, to 
prevent along our 17,000 miles of coastline the entry of 
cholera and other plagues. Its health sentinels are 
on the watch the world over to send in the danger 
warning. 

And all this time, working quietly in their laborato¬ 
ries or in the field, the ablest medical men of the country 
are carrying on their scientific labors to find the causes 
of and cures for disease, and to give their years and 
their genius to the saving of human life and the pre¬ 
vention of human suffering. 

We, as Americans, have a right to be proud of what 
our country is doing. And in this chapter I have 
touched on only a few of her many peace-time victories 
over suffering, disease, and death. The better you 
know what is being done, the greater and more loyal 
can be your service as an American Catholic in this 
wonderful cause. 

Pew days pass that do not bring a chance to a boy 


30 


PLAY FAIR 


who is on his job to do a good turn for the sick and in¬ 
jured. It ma!y be only dropping in to see one of the 
boys who is under the weather, or bringing him an inter¬ 
esting story to read. It may be doing a little amateur 
nursing or first aid work at home or on the athletic 
field. It may be just bandaging a cut, or treating a 
bad bruise or burn or sprain. It may be a little pre¬ 
ventive work like fly-swatting, or kicking a slippery 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


FIRST AID 

First, know how. Secondly, do it 

banana peel off the sidewalk, or picking up a rusty nail 
or bit of broken glass that may be stepped on. Or, 
again, the big opportunity may come. You may have 
the chance to save a life,—a drowning person, a child 
in a burning building, an auto victim. 

The job might be a little one or a big one. Two 
things are necessary. First, to know how. Second, to 
do it. Men like Gorgas and Pasteur did things. They 


A HELPING HAND TO THE SICK 


31 


knew how. They used their heads. Use yours. 
Learn all you can about First Aid and Safety First and 
Life Saving. What chances have you had? And how 
have you measured up to them? Especially in the 
everyday things? If you have measured up, splendid! 
You have played your part in a big work, a big Amer¬ 
ican work, and a big Catholic work. What have you 
done, you have done for Him and to Him. “I was sick, 
and you visited Me.” 


CHAPTER IV 
Going Shares 

Several years ago three of us were canoeing and 
camping through part of the northern lakeland. Among 
some of the incidents of the cruise was getting marooned 
by a gale for two days and nights on a speck of an 
island not more than twenty-five yards Jong in the 
middle of a large lake about five miles in diameter. 
During all the two days there was not an hour's lull in 
the storm. The clouds scudded like white -hawks 
across the sky. The wind whistled and roared through 
the dozen pines on our islet and bit angrily into the blue 
surface of the lake. The waters seethed with whitecaps. 

We had put out from shore with a gentle breeze at 
our backs to pay a short visit to Gull Island, as our 
wind-swept refuge was called. A mile or so out from 
the shore, the breeze rapidly freshened into a gale. 
We could not turn back safely. So we ran before the 
wind, and, splashed with spray, bumped into our islet. 

On the island, we found fifteen small two-legged balls 
of grey black-spotted down and fluff. They were 
young Herring Gulls just out of the shell. The old 
birds were afraid on account of our presence to approach 
their young. So for the whole time of our stay, we had 
the job of feeding by hand fifteen hungry young gulls! 
Had we neglected them, they would all have died. 
And gulls, like nearly all birds, are not only beautiful 
to look at, but are also valuable benefactors of man. 

You and I were once, not so many years ago, just as 
helpless and dependent as these newly-hatched gulls. 
They would have been able to shift for themselves 

32 


GOING SHARES 


33 


within a month perhaps. You and I were unable to 
shift for ourselves for years after our birth. There is 



MAROONED 

Above: Gull Island in the middle of Great Opeongo Lake. Below: One of 
the fifteen newly hatched gulls getting lunch 


nothing on earth more helpless and dependent than a 
human infant. 


34 


PLAY FAIR 


Even today, long years after our infancy days, we 
may still be dependent for food, clothing, and shelter on 
our parents, although most healthy American boys in 
case of necessity could earn a living. But to any of us, 
however strong or prosperous, in our teens or past 
them, hard luck days may come, through an accident 
or illness or other misfortune, and we may become 
dependent on others within our own family or outside 
of it for the bare necessities of life. Thrift, saving, and 
insurance are a breakwater against the coming storm, 
but even they do not always hold. 

At our birth, we are born into a family and a home. 
But we are also born into a larger family, our commun¬ 
ity, our city, our nation, and the great worldwide 
family, whose Father is Our Father in. Heaven, on 
Whom we are from the cradle to the grave dependent 
even for the very air we breathe, for our lives, for 
everything. 

It may at first seem a very large family. But com¬ 
pared with the countless millions who lived and died in 
centuries gone, it is not so large after all. And if we 
could be carried to one of the great stars a million times 
larger than our earth, and were to look through a 
powerful telescope—for this tiny world of ours could 
not be seen at all with the naked eye—we should then 
see that the home which shelters Our Heavenly Father’s 
human children is relatively no bigger than a beehive 
or an anthill. But let us come back to earth, before we 
get dizzy. 

Dependent all the days of our life on Our Father in 
Heaven, dependent all the early years of our life on our 
parents here, each or any of us may become dependent 
again for a while or for good at any time in life through 
injustice and foul play from others, or through old age 



GOING SHARES 


35 


or unforeseen hard luck like grave accident or long 
illness. In our community or in our great human 
family, some of the folks are being overtaken by hard 
luck commonly. Even in our prosperous America, 
whole groups of our people are underfed, badly nour¬ 
ished, poorly housed, insufficiently clothed. Just to 



Courtesy of Catholic Charities of Archdiocese of New Xork 


KINDNESS TO THE CRIPPLED 

Catholic care of the crippled boy and girl includes giving them plenty of 

chance to play 


give one instance out of scores. A few years ago in 
some of our day schools, it was found that many of the 
boys had to leave home and start their morning’s 
classes and study without a mouthful of breakfast, 
not even a crust of dry bread. Their parents had 
nothing to give them. Any boy in the class with a 
spark of generosity in his make-up would of course 








36 


PLAY FAIR 


have shared with his hungry chums, but the latter 
kept their gnawing hunger a secret. They were too 
self-respecting to beg, and so were their parents. But 
the need remained just the same, and they suffered. 

In every city and town and rural district can be found 
some of Christ’s brothers who suffer from want. What 
is done for them? 

As a Catholic boy, you know that in most parishes 
there is a Saint Vincent de Paul Society, with a society 
of Catholic women helping in many cases. The Saint 
Vincent de Paul Society is made up of Catholic laymen, 
who give their services without pay, who go into the 
homes of those in need and help with groceries, or rent, 
or clothes, or whatever may be necessary. In other 
parishes this is done personally by the priest. In an 
increasing number of parishes, a religious or lay social 
worker gives her whole time to such parish visiting. 
The first thing that you see as you enter a Catholic 
church is the poor box. 

In our cities are scores of homes for the aged, the 
orphan, the homeless, the down-and-out, where shelter, 
food and clothing are given for Our Lord’s sake, and 
where thousands of self-sacrificing sisters and brothers 
of our Catholic religious orders serve, seeking no re¬ 
muneration and giving their lives for Christ’s least 
brethren. In the United States alone there are more 
than three hundred Catholic orphan homes taking care 
of about 50,000 children, and there are about a hundred 
and forty Catholic homes for the aged. In recent 
years, orphan and dependent children are being placed 
more and more in private homes where they receive, so 
far as is possible, the care, training, education, and affec¬ 
tion which they would receive were their parents living 
or able to care for them. This is called “home-placing.” 


GOING SHARES 


37 


A modern writer, one of the best non-Catholic 
authorities in the field of charitable work has said: 
“Of all the churches the one that still induces the 
largest amount of giving in proportion to the means of 
those who give is no doubt the Roman Catholic.” The 
most remarkable man in the annals of modern charity 
is St. Vincent de Paul, the founder of the Sisters of 
Charity. The poor, the aged, the sick, the galley- 
slave, the orphan and the foundling, the war-ruined and 
the famine-stricken,—to all he was protector, friend, 
father. His friends used to twit him about his coarse 
patched cassock and his shabby hat, but he would 
smile good-humoredly and go on wearing them, not 
however forgetting to keep them, such as they were, 
scrupulously clean and brushed. He thought of 
himself last or not at all. And love for God’s poor 
went hand in hand with wonderful genius for organizing 
work on a great scale and preventing fraud. Moreover, 
he anticipated many of our most advanced charity 
methods of the twentieth century, although he died in 
1660. 

Speaking of fraud, suppose a strange man approaches 
you on the street, tells you a hard luck story, and ends 
by asking you for a dime to get a sandwich. Do you 
think it would be good policy to give it to him, if you 
had it? Or would you get him in touch with the Saint 
Vincent de Paul Society or some other charitable 
organization? 

The American people, Catholic and non-Catholic, 
inspired by Christian kindness to those in need, give 
and give generously. Suffering from flood, fire, plague, 
famine, and war brings forth contributions totalling 
millions and millions of dollars, as it has done in 
recent post-war days. Homes for the old folks and for 


38 


PLAY FAIR 


the homeless child are found throughout the land. In 
every village, town, and city are societies that work for 
the relief of distress. In most cities there is a com¬ 
munity-wide organization, known under such names as 
the Associated Charities, The Charities Organization 
Society and so forth. Workers who are paid a modest 
salary go out into the homes to find what is needed. 
Careful records are kept, and a complete list of all in¬ 
dividuals or families assisted, known as the confidential 
exchange, is kept at a central office as a check-up on 
those who would rather beg than work. In a modern 
city there are many conditions that did not exist in 
the villages and small towns of our great-grandfathers. 
The city has brought great poverty and suffering, not¬ 
withstanding all our boasted advance in civilization. 
It has also brought more opportunities for the fakir 
who prefers begging to earning a living by the sweat 
of his brow. 

In a Trappist monastery outside the walls of Rome, 
I once saw the following short inscription from St. 
Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians, in large 
black letters on the plain white walls of the diningroom: 
“If any man will not work, neither let him eat.” That 
is a blunt way of saying that charity given to the lazy 
does more harm than good. We cannot safely let our 
hearts and our hands run away with our heads. One 
of the greatest charities is to find a good honest job for 
a man out of work. So, much of our modern Catholic 
and non-Catholic charity work consists in finding jobs 
for the jobless, and also in coaching young boys and 
girls to prepare for and find the right kind of trades 
and professions. 

Civic efforts for better housing, for better water 
water supply, for better milk supply, for honest mate- 


GOING SHARES 


39 


rial in clothing, for pure food laws—these and a hundred 
other modern aims for the well-being of the community 
are, when done in God’s name, modern ways of carry¬ 
ing out the works of mercy for the hungry, the thirsty, 
the naked, and the shelterless. 

Conditions change. New ways must be devised for 
meeting new needs. But the spirit of the works of 



Courtesy of Dairy Division, U. S. Bureau of Animal Industry 


TESTING MILK 

Left: Taking sample. Center: Preparing sample for examination. Right: 
Counting bacteria. One of the thousand and one ways in which the people 
through their government carry out the works of mercy in civic life. What 
works of mercy are being carried out in this test? 


mercy remains the same. And what a new spirit it 
was in human history, which Our Saviour taught! 
The civilized world at Our Lord’s time was of course 
not entirely wanting in sympathy for the distressed. 
Man can never fall that low. But the poor were 
looked upon with contempt, or with a pity that was 
not far from contempt. “Can you descend so far that 





40 


PLAY FAIR 


the poor do not disgust you?” wrote the old Roman 
rhetorician of the first century, Quintilian. “He de¬ 
serves ill of a beggar,” another Roman, Plautus, writes, 
“who gives him food and drink. For that which is 
given is thrown away, and the life of the beggar is 
prolonged to his misery.” Could you imagine a 
modern Catholic or a modern American saying this? 
With Our Lord came a new spirit towards the poor 
into the world. 

“I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was 
thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was naked and 
you clothed me.” Our Lord was born poorest of the 
poor. Can any home be humbler than the deserted 
cattle stable in which He was born? The three great 
Wise Men, prominent men in their own far country, 
came to honor Him. So, too, did the lowly shepherds. 
But He chose the shepherds to come first. When He 
grew up, He could say: “The foxes have their dens 
and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man 
has not where to lay his head.” Yet He was so sym¬ 
pathetic to the needy that He worked the great miracle 
of multiplying the loaves and fishes because “He had 
compassion on the multitude” who were hungering. 

Charity and generosity then is nothing more than 
being generous with what we have to those who have 
not. It is sharing the good things we have,—money, 
a box of candy, a good meal, a good time, the use of a 
baseball or a football, anything,—with those who are 
not so lucky. We often call it generosity as we call its 
opposite by one of the ugliest names in our language, 
stinginess. For the average boy, there is no better 
way of being charitable than by being generous to the 
folks at home or to the other fellows a # t school or on the 
playground, whenever we have something we can share 


GOING SHARES 


41 


with them. In sharing with them, you share with 
Him. Charity is being generous till it hurts. 

Not what we give, but what we share,— 

For the gift without the giver is bare; 

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,— 
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me. 

James Russell Lowell. 


CHAPTER V 
Welcoming the Stranger 

You know, no doubt, the St. Bernard dog, with his 
massive bulk of 150 pounds, his even temper, his high 
intelligence, his keen scent, and wonderful tracking 
powers. The breed was developed by the Augustinian 
monks of the Great St. Bernard Pass over the Swiss 
Alps. 

The Great St. Bernard hospice will celebrate its 
thousandth birthday during this century. It was es¬ 
tablished in 902 A. D. by Sf. Bernard of Menthon eight 
thousand feet up in the snowelad Alps. The St. Ber¬ 
nard pass is for nine months of the year covered with 
snow as much as seven or eight feet deep and blocked 
often by drifts five times as deep. Even in midsummer, 
a thin coating of ice often forms at night on the nearby 
lakes. 

The monks go out with their dogs in the most blind¬ 
ing blizzards to search for lost travelers. Some years 
ago two of the monks lost their lives in such a labor of 
love for the stranger. In the hospice today, you may 
still see the mounted skin of one of the dogs that had 
saved no less than sixty-eight lives and was at last 
killed by mistake. A traveler had fallen unconscious 
in the snow and cold. The dog pawed away the snow 
and threw its great body on the body of the man to 
warm him. When the man came to, he mistook the 
dog for a wolf and plunged a dagger into its heart. 
The St. Bernard breed was almost exterminated during 
the last century by a fatal avalanche which killed all 
but three of the pack. 

42 


WELCOMING THE STRANGER 


43 


Recently small shelter huts, equipped with telephone 
and electric bell connections with the hospice, have 
been erected on the neighboring mountains for the 
benefit of exhausted, lost, or snowbound travelers. 
From 20,000 to 25,000 travelers cross the pass each 
year. 

I bring up the instance of the Great St. Bernard, not 
to tell you things you probably already know, but to 
call your attention to the original and ingenious use of 
ancient and modern methods by the monks in their 
heroic work of mercy to the stranger and traveler. 
Moreover the work at the Great Saint Bernard pass is a 
surviving relic of a former enormous chain of hospices 
for offering hospitality to wayfarers. 

Centuries ago, in the Middle Ages, traveling was 
often an arduous and perilous undertaking. There 
were no luxurious Pullmans, no Twentieth Century 
Limiteds, no .autos, not even stage coaches. Bandits 
infested the less frequented parts. The roads were 
often impassable. Bridges were few. Swirling and 
deep rivers and dangerous fords had to be crossed. 

Lay brotherhoods or religious orders or other gener¬ 
ous folks were accustomed therefore to build shelter 
huts at bridgeheads and fords, to run ferries at river- 
crossings, to cut trails and lay out roads and build 
bridges, and all this as a work of Catholic charity, not 
as a business or money-making venture. 

To-day governments do this work for the common 
convenience of the people, or occasionally private 
persons undertake it for gain. In the United States 
the opening up of the middle and far west has depended 
on the development of roads and railways and water- 
routes. Many of our great highways and railway trunk 
lines, such as those from New York city to Albany and 


44 


PLAY FAIR 


the Great Lakes, or from Washington to Cumberland, 
Pittsburgh and the Ohio Valley, follow the old stage 
coach routes, just as these in turn had followed the still 
older Indian trails. 

The whole people acting through their county, state, 
or federal government spend great sums on road-build¬ 
ing, street-paving, and bridge-building, because of the 



Courtesy of U. 8. Coast Guard 

COAST GUARD CUTTER ON ICE-PATROL DUTY 

It was such an icy monster that sent the Titanic to the bottom carrying 
down to death over 1,500 souls. The Coast Guard sends its scouts to locate 
and give warning of these floating dangers in the great ocean lanes of travel. 
Would you call this charity to the stranger and traveler? 

vital part streets and roads and bridges play in the 
community’s prosperity, safety, and happiness. In 
earlier times, these things were just as important, but 
governments were often too weak, too poor, or too 
selfish to do this service for the community and the 
traveler. Consequently generous and charitable people 
undertook road-making and bridge-building as a work 



WELCOMING THE STRANGER 


45 


of mercy. By the way, under which of the corporal 
works of mercy would this come? 

Indulgences even were granted for taking part in 
such work just as they are granted today for saying 
the Stations of the Cross. To give an example, here is 
the exact wording from a decree of the Bishop of 
Durham in England of the 14th century: “We remit 
forty days of the penances imposed on all our parish¬ 
ioners and others. . . . sincerely contrite and confessed 
of their sins, who shall help by their charitable gifts, 
or by their bodily labor, in the building or in the main¬ 
tenance of the causeway between Brotherton and 
Ferrybridge where a great many people pass by.” And 
the same indulgence is granted to those who assist 
“towards the building and repair of Botyton bridge.” 

Notice that then as now, in order to gain an indul¬ 
gence, that is, the remission of part or all of the tem¬ 
poral punishment due to our sins, the person had to be 
in the state of grace, “contrite and confessed,” and had 
to do a work of charity, a good turn. Indulgences 
have been and are a great spur to all kinds of practical 
services to our neighbor. 

Road-making and bridge-building as a work of 
mercy sounds odd to us, does it not? The granting of 
indulgences therefor sounds still more curious? What 
do you think of it? 

Let us come back to our own days and our own 
country. Back in the remote mountain sections of our 
East, out on the far prairies of our West, in the lumber 
and timber lands of our North and South, a stranger, 
overtaken by night, will usually be received at a 
settler’s or farmer’s house or at a lumber camp and 
gladlygiven hospitality and a night’s shelter. Should the 
stranger offer to pay his host, the latter would be insulted. 


46 


PLAY FAIR 


In our towns and cities, it is different. A stranger 
calls at your door and asks for a night’s lodging. Under 
our modern city conditions, could you take him in 
ordinarily? You could, but the experiment might be 
a little hard on the family spoons and your sister's 
jewelry. In most cities there are lodging houses, 
under Catholic or other auspices, provided for just 
such cases. It would be better to refer him thither. 

In most towns and in all cities, there are homes for 
girls who are at work in offices, stores, or factories, and 
who either have no homes of their own or else are 
obliged to live away from home. There are more than 
one hundred and thirty such girls’ homes or girls’ 
clubs under Catholic auspices in the United States, to 
say nothing of the great number under the Y. W. C. A. 
and other non-Catholic auspices. Perhaps these would 
have been sufficient forty or fifty years ago, but to-day 
they are sheltering at most not more than five per cent 
of the million and more girls-away-from-home in the 
big cities of our country. And to build enough such 
homes and clubs to-day would cost at least a billion 
dollars. So a new plan, the room registry, is being 
tried out and is working splendidly. 

The room registry is simply a downtown office,— 
often with branches, if the city be a very large one,— 
where a list of approved boarding houses, rooming 
houses, and private homes is kept. Before the girl or 
other applicant is recommended to such living quarters, 
the room and house are carefully investigated for the 
purpose of making sure that the price asked is fair, 
and that the health and moral conditions are good. 
By one Catholic room registry known to me, no less 
than 2,000 girls have been so directed to safe shelter 
during the last year. 


WELCOMING THE STRANGER 


47 


The Travelers’ Aid is another new way of looking 
after the stranger and traveler. Look around the 
railroad stations in nearly any large city and you will 
see the sign “Travelers’ Aid.’’ A child traveling with 
its parents becomes lost. A feeble old man reaches a 
strange city and has lost the address of his relatives to 
whom he is going. A mother with three small children 
is stranded and cannot speak English. A pure young 
girl from a country village or from a foreign land, 
. coming to a big city and innocent of its crooks and 
tricks, is taken in tow by a well-dressed and glib 
scoundrel who may trap her into moral ruin, before she 
is aware. Such are some of the cases almost daily met 
and helped by the Travelers’ Aid worker. 

Hospices and St. Bernard dogs, road-making and 
bridge-building, lodging houses and girls’ homes and 
clubs, room registries and Travelers’ Aid work, these 
and kindred plans and schemes seem at first sight 
curious ways of carrying out Our Lord’s simple words: 
“I was a stranger, and ye took Me in.’’ What do you 
think about it? 

A stranger in your community stops you on the street 
and asks: “What is the shortest way to the railroad 
station?” A group of boys volunteer for guide duty at 
a convention or during Old Home Week. A team 
from another part of the city comes over to play a 
match game with your team. A new boy joins your 
club, or enters your school, or moves into your block. 
Is there any chance here to do a good turn for the 
stranger? 

The Catholic Hospital Association recently held its 
annual convention at the Catholic University of Amer¬ 
ica in Washington city. Among the delegates were 
five or six hundred sisters, who had come from all over 



■m m 

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■ < 
"~fr rit* • 


Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


A GOOD TURN TO THE STRANGER 
Guide duty at a veterans’ reunion 



550 * 


' * > ‘Xf-' 

* 





WELCOMING THE STRANGER 


49 


the country, some from the far west and the Pacific 
Coast, and some from Canada and the Canadian 
Northwest. The troops of Catholic Boy Scouts of 
Washington met them on their arrival at the station, 
helped them with their baggage, directed and guided 
them to the University, and did scores of good turns 
for them during the four days of the convention. 
Would you call this welcoming the stranger? 

Suppose you are going to get up a minstrel show. 
One of the first things you do is to brush the cobwebs 
out of your brain and start thinking out new stunts for 
the show. You think and think hard. You use your 
head. It is just the same in the matter of lending a 
hand and doing good turns. Nothing else, not even a 
minstrel show, opens up a better field for original new 
schemes and plans. The St. Bernard monks went so 
far in inventiveness and originality in carrying out 
their work of mercy as actually to develop a new breed 
of dogs for their work, just as our own American 
wizards, Burbank in California and Father Schoener in 
Oregon, are developing new kinds of flowers, fruits, 
berries, and vegetables. In order to help other people, 
the monks had to keep themselves mentally alert. 

One of the best things about the good-turn game is 
that it gives you a chance to use your head. No one 
else can think out good turns for you. Most of them, 
at least, you have to think out yourself. You have 
to keep on your toes, and, when you see an opening, 
think and act quickly, and jump in. 

A flivver has seven thousand parts, its inventor tells 
us. Your brain has seven times seven thousand parts. 
A flivver, however much we laugh about it, can do some 
wonderful things, but it cannot hold a candle to the 
wonderful stunts your brain can do, if you use it. 


50 


PLAY FAIR 


Flivvers were made to run. God gave us our brains 
to carry us over the streets and roads of life. He did 
not give any of us more than we need. 

Park your brains when you sleep. The other fifteen 
hours of the twenty-four, at play, at work, or at good 
turns, keep them running. Give them plenty of gas. 
That’s why God gave them to you. 



CHAPTER VI 

Service by Counsel 

How would you like to have a barocyclonometer to 
play with! If you were camping in the Philippines, it 
would come in handy. 

What is the worst storm or cyclone that you can re¬ 
member? Were any people killed or injured? Have 
you ever been down in a cyclone cellar, such as they 
have in the west? Did you ever hear of the West 
Indian hurricane which drove a huge tidal wave across 
the island city of Galveston, flooding and wrecking the 
city, killing several thousand people, and destroying 
many million dollars’ worth of property? 

In the Philippine Islands, the hurricanes, or bagufos, 
as they are called there, are dreaded visitors. They 
used formerly to sweep through the islands without 
notice, wrecking hundreds of ships, tearing down towns, 
killing thousands, rendering tens of thousands home¬ 
less, and playing havoc with the crops on which the 
people depended for their daily bread. The work of 
Jesuit scientists in the islands has largely helped to 
prevent such distressing consequences. 

First, Father Frederic Faura, a Jesuit priest, after 
years of study, invented an instrument called the 
“Faura barometer” for detecting hurricanes afar off. 
Later another Jesuit priest, Father Jose Algue, per¬ 
fected this instrument, calling the new one by the 
simple little name of the “barocyclonometer.” Now, 
an approaching typhoon may be scented days ahead of 
its coming. Warnings are telegraphed and cabled in 

51 


52 


PLAY FAIR 


all directions. People and ships seek cover. Every¬ 
thing is taut and ready when the storm breaks. 

An American army officer who had seen this work of 
the Jesuits in the Philippines, once said to me: “Doesn’t 
it seem strange that priests, ordained for religious work, 
should give their lives in this way to studying the 
weather.” What do you think about it? 



Courtesy of U. S. Coast Guard 


THE STRANDED SHIP “ THISTLEMORE ” 

Ocean storms take a heavy toll of lives and vessels. In what ways do the 
American people through their government bureaus help to prevent such 
disasters by “instructing” and “counseling?” 


We, in the United States, have a good deal of fun 
over the mistakes our national Weather Bureau occa¬ 
sionally makes. But, of course, we all know the great 
service it^daily^does for us. Those of us who live in 
cities do not, it is true, bother much about the weather, 
except when it spoils a doubleheader at the ball park or 




SERVICE BY COUNSEL 


53 


breaks up a day’s hike in the country. Nevertheless, 
we depend on the weather for all sorts of things. 

To the farmer or ranchman, foreknowledge of a 
cyclone, a blizzard, or a killing frost may mean his 
season’s earnings saved. To the dwellers on the Gulf 
Coast, foreknowledge of a hurricane may mean whole 
towns and cities saved from ruin and suffering. To the 
fisherman, or the sea captain, foreknowledge of a bad 
storm may mean his boat, crew, and passengers saved. 
To inhabitants of low-lying river basins, foreknowledge 
of a flood may mean homes, possessions, and lives saved. 
Imparting such information beforehand is one of the 
many services rendered by our Weather Bureau. 

Weather scouts the world over, code-signal the news 
each day to the Weather Bureau. All this information, 
much of it coming by wireless from ships at sea, is 
compared and studied, and the forecast is made up and 
wired out broadcast. In about ninety per cent of 
cases the forecast is correct, and, as regards great 
storms, such as those which approach us by way of 
Alaska and the northwest or by way of the Caribbean 
and the southwest, the forecast is almost mathematic¬ 
ally accurate. 

All this naturally contributes to the saving of human 
lives and the prevention of human suffering, as well as 
to the safeguarding of homes, food resources, and other 
property. Is not this lending a hand to humanity? 
What then will you call work like Father Faura’s and 
Father Algue’s, done as it has been for their fellowmen, 
and done in Our Lord’s name? Do you think you 
could call it a spiritual work of mercy,— 4 ‘counseling 
the doubtful” or “instructing the ignorant?” Let us 
turn elsewhere. 

You have perhaps seen, or have at least seen pictures 


54 


PLAY FAIR 


of, the largest statue in the world, the Statue of Liberty, 
in New York harbor. Forty persons can stand within 
the head. It was contributed to the American people 
by the people of France to commemorate the hundredth 
anniversary of American independence. 

Nearly beneath the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, 
is Ellis Island, our most important immigrant station, 



Courtesy of T. V. Powderly 

RUTHENIAN WOMEN ARRIVING ELLIS ISLAND 


These mothers of future American citizens, who bring us their gifts as we 
offer them ours, receive a helping hand through immigrant aid societies 


\ 

the gateway through which pass the bulk of the new¬ 
comers to our shores. From all lands they come in an 
unending stream, averaging some years as high as 
3,000 per day. We hospitably open our doors to them, 
barring generally in normal times only the mentally 
unsound, the criminal, and those unable to take care of 
themselves. 










SERVICE BY COUNSEL 


55 


The immigrants are usually strong, industrious, 
honest, kindly, and law-abiding. They bring us their 
gifts as we offer them ours. But their quest of happi¬ 
ness, home, and opportunity is not an easy one. They 
need a helping hand from us. Ignorance of our cus¬ 
toms and laws, and their own often exaggerated ideas 
of liberty, bring them sometimes into conflict with our 
courts. Crooked employment agencies trick them. 
Wily schemers cheat them of their honest wages. 
Drifting into the crowded, congested, and least healthy 
sections of our great cities, they and their families lose 
the color from their cheeks and fall ill. Their growing 
boys and girls, often through little fault of their own or 
of their parents, get caught in the whirlpool of lawless¬ 
ness and immorality, and are haled into our juvenile 
courts. And ignorance of our language on the part of 
the old folks frequently makes matters much worse. 

About twenty different volunteer societies have their 
agents at Ellis Island to interpret and look after the 
needs of the new arrivals. This Immigrant Aid work, 
carried out by religious and other organizations, in¬ 
cludes also plans for seeing the immigrant safely to his 
destination in far distant cities. Catholics are doing a 
share of this work. Catholics are even now perfecting 
a nation-wide plan for dealing with the newly arrived 
Catholic immigrant and have already been doing a 
vast work to help him in soul and body;—teaching him 
our language and laws, strenuously working for fair 
play to him, and safeguarding him against those who 
would rob him of his most precious possession, the 
faith of his fathers. The Catholic Church has been 
and is the greatest force in the United States laboring 
for the welfare of the immigrant. Thousands of 
Catholic churches, schools, and institutions, built up 


56 


PLAY FAIR 


through love and sacrifice by bishops, priests, and 
people, are daily laboring at their gigantic task of 
making him and his children worthwhile members of 
the commonwealth of America as well as of the common¬ 
wealth of God. 

Other types of helpfulness to the immigrant are 
along the lines of Legal Aid and Big Brother and Big 
Sister work. But these are of course designed to help 
not only the immigrant but great numbers of native- 
born Americans too. They are very modern ways of 
“counseling the doubtful, admonishing the sinner, and 
instructing the ignorant/’ 

A wage-earner had done an honest week’s work. 
His employer would not pay him the ten dollars due to 
him. The wage-earner went to the court of justice. 
The case was tried and decided in favor of the wage- 
earner. The employer appealed the decision. Delay 
followed delay. It was only at the end of nearly two 
years, after spending in all eleven days in court, that 
the wage-earner was able to get a final decision and 
collect his ten dollars. And had it not been for the 
assistance of the local Legal Aid Society, it would have 
cost the man perhaps ten times ten dollars in time lost 
and in court charges and lawyer fees to recover his 
small but just debt. 

Hundreds of thousands of poor people in the United 
States, among them a great number of immigrants, 
have been and are being so robbed of wages, by a few 
unscrupulous employers. 

Another case from actual life. A woman borrowed 
ten dollars from a money lender in 1914. For two 
years she paid interest at 180 per cent. In 1916 a new 
local law fixed the maximum interest at 36 per cent. 
The money lender tried to evade the law and make 


SERVICE BY COUNSEL 


57 


her pay 156 per cent. She went to. court. She was 
told she would have to pay five dollars for court costs 
and ten dollars to an attorney. She did not have 
fifteen dollars and had no means of earning it. She 
was helpless. 

In thousands of cases, too, people are arrested on 
suspicion or on evidence that seems sufficient to the 
guardians of the law. These guardians are simply 
doing their duty, of course. Nevertheless, a poor 
person so arrested, and awaiting trial, may, even 
though actually innocent, unless he furnish bail be 
detained a prisoner for weeks and months, owing to 
crowded dockets at court and the “law’s delays.” 

It is not so much that our laws are unjust or unfair 
in these matters. It is rather a question of red tape 
and overcrowded dockets. Nor again would it be fair 
to blame the lawyers. The final clause of their Oath 
of Admission to the Bar reads as follows: “I will never 
reject from any consideration personal to myself the 
cause of the defenseless or the oppressed, or delay any 
man’s cause for lucre or malice. So help me God.” 
This is the lend-a-hand tradition of the legal profession. 
In our modern villages and small towns the tradition is 
well lived up to. In our large cities it is not always easy 
for the lawyer to tell whether the unknown client who 
drops into his office is worthy or unworthy, is really 
poor or just a skinflint. 

To meet this new situation in our modern life, small 
claims courts and similar institutions have been set up 
in some of our cities. These cut the red tape, get 
quick action, and at little or no cost. They are a part 
of the official court system. In addition, in nearly all 
our cities today are to be found Legal Aid societies, 
supported by generous people. Through them an 


58 


PLAY FAIR 


attorney is furnished to the poor person, without any 
cost at all or at the least cost which they can afford to 
pay. An idea of the size of the work carried on by the 
Legal Aid organizations in the United States is given 
by the fact that up to 1919 attorneys had been pro¬ 
vided for 1,133,700 persons. Claims for unpaid wages 
outnumber all others. 

Big Brother and Big Sister work is coming more and 
more to the front, and our Catholic men and women are 
taking a splendid part in it. . Here are a couple of 
typical cases. A boy is playing truant, has gotten out 
of his parents’ control, is going around with a tough 
gang, and is w T ell on his way to the Juvenile Court and 
the reformatory. A girl is drifting away from her 
religion, is staying out till late hours in the evening at 
dance halls, and is in danger of falling into the clutches 
of an unprincipled fast man who will be her ruin. The 
Big Brother who volunteers to look after the boy and 
the Big Sister wdio looks after the girl spend at least 
a few hours each w r eek with their charges, show them 
good times, help them out of tight places, and are to 
them not stern superiors, but good friends, helpers, and 
counsellors. In one city alone, Chicago, the Catholic 
Big Brothers of the Holy Name Society so helped 
15,000 boys between 1917 and 1920. 

There are so many different ways in wdiich the 
spiritual w r orks of mercy can be and are being carried 
on in our modern American life, that this whole book 
could be filled with accounts of them. The ones we 
have touched on are only some of the newer ones that 
are particularly in use in our own America. Can you 
think of any others? 

Before passing on, I should like to call your attention 
to one such work of mercy by which you can do good 


SERVICE BY COUNSEL 


59 


turns daily, easily, and without shouting about them 
through a megaphone. Every Sunday at mass, you 
hear the priest read something like the following: “The 
prayers of the congregation are asked for James Smith 
who is seriously ill, and for the repose of the soul of 
Mary Brown.” A practical Catholic never forgets to 
pray daily for his relatives and friends and enemies, 
living and dead. It is a debt of honor to them and 
to God, the Father of us all. 

Some of the religious orders are very strict, as you 
know. The members seldom or never eat meat; they 
talk very little; they never go outside their cloisters; 
they dress in coarse clothes^ they rise at midnight or 
before dawn for prayer. Non-Catholics sometimes 
ask. What do they do all the time? They train to 
love God and man, just as an athletic team trains to 
win games. They do many good turns daily, but one 
of their chief good turns is this: they pray for people 
who will not or do not pray for themselves. Their lives 
are one long spiritual work of mercy. As a Catholic, 
you may have chances to explain to non-Catholic 
friends who ask you the fine deeds of mercy these strict 
cloistered orders are doing. To do so intelligently, a 
boy has to be prepared by knowing the facts. 


CHAPTER VII 

Good Turns 

There are about 8,000,000 boys in the United States 
and there are 365 days in the year. Suppose each boy 
pledged himself to do even one small good turn a day. 
Then multiply 8,000,000 by 365, and you will get the 
record of good turns for a single year in the United 
States alone. 

By the way, have you given a lift or lent a hand or 
done a good turn to anybody to-day? If not yet, 
better do it now. This book will stay put. To-day 
will not; it is racing away from you fast. And doing a 
good turn is more worth while any day than reading a 
book. 

John the Baptist was an outdoor man. You re¬ 
member him, don’t you? He was Our Lord’s cousin. 
He spent his life from boyhood in the open. He was 
tanned as brown as a lifeguard. He knew campcraft 
and woodcraft. He had to.. He despised mollycoddle 
ways. His clothing was woven of rough camel’s hair 
and fastened with a leather belt. His food was locusts 
and wild honey. The honey was not so bad. I do not 
know about the locusts. It is said that they are not 
so bad either, when you get used to them and when you 
have learned how to cook them. But you had better 
not try them, at least not until you have passed a real 
test in outdoor or camp cooking. 

John was not afraid of anything or anybody, once 
he knew he was right. He was not afraid to face 
death, when he saw his duty ahead of him. He faced 
death and died rather than be a coward and dodge a 
dangerous duty. 

GO 


GOOD TURNS 


61 


The king of the country was Herod Antipas, a 
cunning, underhand, weak, cowardly, sensual scoundrel. 
Herod seized John, and flung him into a deep dungeon 
of the royal fortress, far off in a wild mountain fastness, 
east of and overlooking the volcanic slopes of the Dead 
Sea. Prisoner though he was, John denounced the king 
to his face, and was at last beheaded, and his bleeding 
head brought to the king in the midst of Herod’s 
drunken and voluptuous birthday-banquet. 

Some time before his death, John sent two of his 
disciples to our Lord who was then across the Jordan 
River in Galilee. They put this question to our Lord: 
'‘Art thou he that art to come, or look we for another?” 
Our Lord simply answered: “Go and relate to John 
what you have heard and seen. The blind see, the 
lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the 
dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to 
them.” Notice the healing of the lepers. Do you 
recall Father Damien and Brother Joseph Dutton a few 
pages back? 

St. Peter, whom our Lord chose to be the head of the 
Apostles and the first Pope, put it once in a single short 
sentence: “He went about doing good.” Or, as we 
might put it, “doing good turns” and “lending a hand.” 
And that is what Our Leader asks us to do too. We 
cannot do the big good turns that He did. But we can 
do our share. “Whosoever shall give you to drink a 
cup of water in my name, shall not lose his reward.” 
Evidently the little turns count too, even the giving 
of a cup of water, if done in His name. 

A tottering and half-blind old man stands on the 
curb waiting a chance to cross a crowded and busy 
street. The autos are speeding along. Would you 
stop a moment on your way to the movies to give him 


62 


PLAY FAIR 



a helping hand across? A boy is beating your dog 
with a thick club. What would you do? A husky 
boy of twelve is brutally pummeling a youngster of 
seven. Would you step up and protect the youngster? 
A poorly-dressed mother carrying an infant in her 


ELK IN YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 

Most of the surviving elk or wapiti are in and around Yellowstone Park 
where the American people through the National Park Service do them 
the big good turn of protecting them against hungry wolves and selfish 

poachers 

arms enters a street car. Would you get up and give 
her your seat? 

The strong shall protect the weak. These are 
everyday good turns. Chivalry does not consist in 
waiting for the big turn that may not come once in a 
lifetime,—like saving a drowning person or rescuing a 
child from a burning building. Chivalry—the chivalry 


Courtesy of National Park Service 


GOOD TURNS 


63 


of the knights of old, of the days of the pioneers—is 
doing the ordinary everyday good turns that the strong 
can do for the weak. And if done in our Lord’s name, 
then we call it a work of mercy. 

“And when the Son of Man shall come in His 
majesty, and all the angels with Him, then shall He 
sit upon the seat of His majesty: and all nations shall 
be gathered before Him, and He shall separate them 
one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep 
from the goats. 

“Then shall the king say to them that shall be on 
His right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, 
possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the 
foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you 
gave me to eat: I was thirsty, arid you gave me to 
drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: naked and 
you clothed me: sick, and you visited me: I was in 
prison, and you came to me. Amen I say to you, as 
long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, 
you did it to me. 

“Then He shall say to them also that shall be on His 
left hand: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting 
fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. 
For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat: I was 
thirty, and you gave me not to drink: I was a stranger, 
and you took me not in: naked and you covered me not: 
sick and in prison, and you did not visit me. Amen 
I say to you, as long as you did it not to one of these 
least, neither did you do it to me. 

“And these shall go into everlasting punishment: but 
the just into life everlasting.” 

It looks, does it not, as if little good turns are not so 
little after all. Your gang, your team, your club 
expects them of you. Evidently Our Lord expects 


64 


PLAY FAIR 


them too. But here too, He never asks us to do any¬ 
thing He has not done Himself, no matter how hard 
it may be or how easy. 

St. Elizabeth of Hungary was known especially for 
her helpfulness and kindness to the sick. One day, 
she found a sick man suffering from a disease so loatli- 



Courtesy ol U. S. Coast Guard 


A RESCUE AT SEA 

One of the many types of good turns done by the Coast Guard under thrill¬ 
ing and dangerous conditions 


some that no one could be found to tend him anv 

c/ 

longer. In her husband’s absence, she had this 
sufferer brought into the ducal palace and given the 
best room there, so she might nurse him herself. When 
her husband, the duke, returned, he was enraged. 
He rushed into the room and dragged off the bed¬ 
clothes in his anger. “But,” the old chronicler tells 
us, “at that instant God Almighty opened the eyes 







GOOD TURNS 


65 


V 

of his soul , and instead of a leper he saw stretched upon 
the bed the figure of Christ crucified.” 

The good turn, if done in His name, is done to Him. 
It is a work of mercy. Every day there come chances 
for lending a hand to the other fellow and doing him a 
good turn. And there is no law against doing as 
many good turns daily as come your way. 

When we do a service for someone, we naturally feel 
happy over it. But that’s no reason for telling every¬ 
body about it. Mr. Dooley once said that some people 
want to see a red light on the altar every time they put 
a nickel in the poor box. If these people give a cup 
of cold water, they put a paid ad about it in the morning 
paper and send an account of the event to the Associated 
Press. 

Don’t let your left hand know the good turn your 
right hand does, is Our Lord’s rule. And this is good 
gang law, too. “See that no man know this,” Our 
Lord strictly charged the two blind men whose sight 
he had just restored to them. But notwithstanding, 
his fame spread abroad in all that country. Do your 
good turn and then forget it. Get action and there 
will be no need of buying a megaphone. Actions speak 
for themselves, and speak louder than words. “What 
you are and do makes so much noise, I can’t hear what 
you say.” 


CHAPTER VIII 
Teamwork 

The Indian knows some wonderful sleight-of-hand 
tricks. A Hidatsa Indian got the name of ‘ Cherry-in- 
the-mouth’ because he could produce from his mouth 
at any season of the year cherries that looked perfectly 
fresh. The Chippewa magicians could hold red-hot 
stones and burning brands in their hands and could 
plunge their hands into boiling water or syrup without 
getting burned. The Hopi can handle poisonous 
snakes without getting bitten or at least without suffer¬ 
ing from the bite. 

One of the most remarkable tricks performed by the 
Navaho and by others is making plants like yucca, 
beans, or corn grow up, blossom, and bear fruit, all in 
a few moments. Artificial flowers and fruit are hidden 
by the performer under his blanket and cleverly 
brought out, unseen in the dim firelight of the camp. 

As wonderful as the growth of these plants, but with¬ 
out the sleight-of-hand, has been the magic growth of 
our American cities in the last century. Milwaukee, 
for instance, with its population of nearly a half 
million today, was, a hundred years ago only a trading 
post in the wilderness. Chicago, now with more than 
two and two-third million inhabitants, was in 1830 a 
pioneer settlement only three-eighths of a mile square 
in which lived twelve families and the garrison of the 
small fort. Even in the earlier settled east, New York 
City, that now has a population of more than five and 
a half millions, had in 1790 only a little more than 
thirty-three thousand. Notice, by the way that most 
of the great cities of over 100,000 are distributed over 


66 


TEAMWORK 


67 


the lower land and the river valleys and are in the 
eastern half of the continent. Why? 

Not only have our big cities grown up like mush¬ 
rooms almost over night, but a greater and greater 
proportion of our American people have become city- 
dwellers. In 1850 about one-eighth only of our popu¬ 
lation lived in cities of more than 8,000 inhabitants. 
To-day a little more than one-half of our people live in 
cities or villages of 2,500 or more. This tremendous 
growth and drift to the city has raised a legion of new 
problems concerning the welfare of all of us. 

Imagine three boys out for a short camping trip. 
Suddenly the camp grows from three to three thousand. 
Think of the new problems that at once arise, regarding 
such things as camping site, layout of tents, supply of 
grub, good order, good fellowship, sanitation and 
health,—to mention only six among a hundred. Just 
such new problems and on a vastly greater scale have 
our suddenly growing cities had to meet, while our 
rural districts have had equally serious though some¬ 
what different ones. The first key to their solution is 
teamwork. 

In wrestling or in running a fifty-yard dash, you go it 
alone. In baseball, or basketball, or football, you are 
part of a team. A pitcher who is being batted all over 
the field is yanked out and a fresh twirler is put in. If 
the retired hurler sulks, everybody just laughs at him. 
They are interested in the fate of the team, not in the 
fate of the individual player. An infielder who plays 
to the gallery instead of scooping the grounder and 
pelting it to first, gets hooted. He is thinking of him¬ 
self, not of the team. It takes a whole team to play a 
baseball game, and only by teamwork can games be 
won and pennants captured. 


68 


PLAY FAIR 


It is the same with the good-turn game. A fellow 
can, of course, do plenty of good turns going it alone, 
such, for instance, as giving his seat to a lady in the 
street cars, by helping an old man across an icy pave¬ 
ment, taking home a lost child, or putting up a drinking 
trough for the birds. But one boy can not carry on 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


THE WINNING CREW 

They would never win the race if they didn’t pull together 


singlehanded a clean-up campaign, or put out a bad 
forest fire, or keep a big summer camp healthy and 
sanitary. 

And so it is too in our fast-growing communities. 
There are and will always be plenty of openings for 
individual good turns, for individual works of mercy, 
to the suffering, the defenceless, the weak, the under¬ 
dog. But more and more the great big problems, 


TEAMWORK 


69 


arising largely as a by-product of this phenomenal 
growth of cities, call for teamwork. 

You remember well, of course, the flu epidemic of 
1918, just as the war was closing. I know one army 
camp in which at one time sixty to seventy soldiers 
were dying daily of it. In the cities and in the country 
districts, often whole families, father, mother, and 
children, were stricken, abed, and at death’s door. 

In such a case as the last, for instance, the next door 
neighbors who had escaped, would come in, call the 
doctor or nurse, give medicine, prepare food, and clean 
house. Here was a work of mercy carried out by in¬ 
dividuals going it alone. 

But such work, kindly and courageous as it was, w-as 
too haphazard to meet the whole larger problem. Not 
every stricken victim would have such neighbors. 
Many well-meaning neighbors did not know what to 
do. So organized groups of individuals, organized 
teams, so to speak, got into the game. In one city, the 
Catholic sisters opened soup kitchens for the sufferers. 
In another, they closed their schools and w T ent out 
nursing in homes and hospitals, and so on. The 
American Bed Cross and local visiting nurses’ societies 
did heroic work. Here was a work of mercy carried 
out by volunteer groups. 

But even all this was not sufficient to fight the epi¬ 
demic. The public health authorities, federal and 
local, took hold of the situation. And at last the 
enemy was conquered and put to rout. Here was a 
work of mercy carried out by the whole people doing 
teamwork on a nation-wide scale. The big all-com¬ 
munity and all-American teams, on which we all play, 
had gotten into the game. Did you? 

We sometimes think of our local or state or federal 


70 


PLAY FAIR 


government as something apart from us, as something 
imposed upon us like a muzzle on a bulldog. This way 
of thinking is a relic of the old days of kings and barons, 
just as the buttons on your coat sleeves are a relic of 
the old days when coat sleeves were slit as shirt sleeves 



Courtosy of T’.oy Scouts of America 


BUILDING THE LOG HUT 

Building a nation and building for the people’s welfare, like building a log 
hut, calls for teamwork by the whole team 


are slit today. Our government is not something 
imposed upon us from above. It is something we 
ourselves have under God created. It is our agent. 
It is not something apart from us. It is you and I, 
and you and I are it. In any community,—be it 
county, village, town, city, state, or nation,—the 






TEAMWORK 


71 


welfare of the people can in many things be safeguarded 
only by the whole community acting as one big team, 
that is, through means of government and of govern¬ 
mental agencies. 

No less true is this in the field of good turns, in the 
field of works of mercy towards the weak, the defence¬ 
less, the suffering. 

Sometimes such good turns and works of mercy can 
be carried out by you or me going it alone. Sometimes 
they call for teamwork by groups of us. Such is the 
fine work done by boys’ clubs working as a body, by 
the Knights of Columbus, by the St. Vincent de Paul 
Societies, by our Catholic religious orders, by immi¬ 
grant aid and legal aid organizations, by visiting 
nurses’ societies, by the Red Cross, and scores of other 
organizations. Sometimes also they call for teamwork 
by the whole people, by the full team, acting through 
its official agencies such as the public health service, 
the children’s bureau, the life-saving service, the 
weather bureau and many other branches of the 
government. Where the whole community, the whole 
people, the whole team acts, or fails to act, through its 
government, we have to remember that the work is 
not being done, or shirked, by some one else . It is 
being done, or shirked, by us. 


CHAPTER IX 
Friendliness 

As you tramp along a forest trail or through the 
fields would you expect to pick juicy ripe blackberries 
off poison ivy plants or fat brown chestnuts off bull 
thistle bushes? There is just about as much chance of 
your stumbling across good turns done by anybody 
who has not the lend-a-hand spirit deep down in his 
heart. 

You may have heard the story of the man who, when 
his alarm clock went off early in the morning, jumped 
out of bed so quickly that he broke his leg. But did 
you ever hear of a man breaking a tooth by saying a 
kind and friendly word? 

The kindest word ever uttered was spoken by Our 
Lord. His enemies had brought to Him a trembling 
sinful woman. According to the stern law of the 
times, the punishment was stoning to death. If He 
condemned her, they would charge Him with cruelty. 
If He pardoned her, they would charge Him with con¬ 
tempt of the law. There seemed no way out for Him. 
They thought they had Him cornered. 

He bent down and wrote with His finger upon the 
ground. Then lifting Himself up, He said to them: 
“He that is without sin among you, let him cast the 
first stone at her.” Again, stooping down, He wrote 
upon the ground. Thwarted and gujlty, one by one 
they all sneaked away, leaving the trembling woman 
alone with Our Lord. 

Then, He rose and said to her: “Woman, where are 
they who accused thee? Hath no man condemned 
72 


FRIENDLINESS 


73 


thee? ’ “No man, Lord,” she answered. And Jesus 
said: Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin 
no more.” 

A kind word never broke a tooth. But more than 
that, the kind word never gets as far as the tooth unless 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


PLAYING THE GAME 

Friendliness means playing the game and taking hard bumps 

with a smile 


it comes from a kindly heart. And few hearts ever 
break from being too filled with kindness and friendli¬ 
ness. They overflow instead. 

When we get blamed and punished for something we 
ourselves have done, we take our medicine like men. 
But did you ever get blamed and punished for some- 


74 


PLAY FAIR 


thing the other fellow did, and have to take his medicine 
for him? How did you feel about it? 

It is a first principle of American law that an accused 
man is innocent until proved guilty. An accused man 
too poor to pay a lawyer to defend him is given one by 
the court. We believe that it is better for ten guilty 
men to get off scot free than for one innocent man to 
suffer. This is one reason among many why lynching, 
no matter how foul the crime committed, is so un- 
American. It is not fair play. And in recent years 
more than one perfectly innocent man has been lynched. 
But his innocence was discovered only after his limp 
and lifeless body had been dangling some hours from 
the limb of a wayside tree. 

A hard battle had been going on. Some of the 
soldiers were retreating in disorder, routed. As one of 
them stumbled along away from the battle front, the 
commanding officer leaned down from his horse, 
touched the man with his sword, and shouted curtly: 
“Go back, Sir.” The soldier silently opened his coat 
and showed his shirt stained red with his life-blood 
gushing from a great wound in his breast. The officer 
dismounted at once to assist him, but the dying soldier 
sank to the ground and in a few moments had passed 
away. 

A fellow who believes in fair play judges fairly. 
He gives the benefit of a doubt always. “Charity 
thinketh no evil.” 

Our uncivilized human brethren in out-of-the-way 
parts of Africa, Oceanica, and elsewhere are ordinarily 
kindly, cheerful, generous, and hospitable folks, ac¬ 
cording to their lights. When, for instance, among 
the lowliest hunting tribes, a man spears a deer for 
food—they never kill for sport or from cruelty—he 


FRIENDLINESS 


75 


will not eat it himself, but will bring it untouched back 
to camp and share it equally with his wife and children 
and all the members of the tribe. We who think our¬ 
selves so civilized might learn much from these least 
brethren for whom Our Saviour died just as truly as 
He died for us, who are immortal children of Our 
Father in heaven just as we are. God plays no favor¬ 
ites. If He has given us civilized Catholics more light 
and faith, He will expect the more from us. But He 
has not denied all light to uncivilized tribes by any 
means. 

They have some knowledge of Him and many of the 
lowliest of them think of Him as a kindly Father. 
They all recognize, in a general way at least, that 
truthfulness, honesty, obedience and loyalty to parents, 
respect for human life, for property and for the sanc¬ 
tity of the home are right. But there are some ugly 
blotches on their table of moral laws. Perhaps the 
ugliest is the custom of blood-revenge. 

Here is an instance. A man’s infant dies of fever. 
The man is ignorant of scientific medicine. He suspects 
that some enemy has bewitched and put a spell on the 
child and so killed it by black magic. He consults the 
wizard or witch-doctor who points out the supposedly 
guilty party. The father secretly poisons the supposed 
murderer in revenge. In turn, the poisoned man’s 
family accuse some one else, and spear the accused 
through the heart. And so it goes on. One purely 
natural death of an infant begets a train of murders in 
revenge. Revenge stalks abroad hand-in-hand with 
superstition. Among uncivilized people, legions of 
innocent men, women and children yearly meet a 
violent death as the result. By the way, to spread 
knowledge and faith, to undermine such superstitions, 


76 


PLAY FAIR 


and thus to uproot such customs, is one of the chief 
works of mercy done by our missionaries. 

Among the great civilized non-Christian peoples of 
Our Lord’s time, here and there a weak voice uttered 
a timid word in praise of forgiveness, but in general, 
the recognized rule of conduct was: Do good to your 
friends, and do mischief to your enemies. 

Then, like a sudden blaze of light athwart the dark¬ 
ness, came the message of the Sermon on the Mount 
from One who spoke with authority. 

“You have heard that it hath been said: An eye for 
an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. You have heard that 
it hath been said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor, but 
hate thy enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies; 
do good to them that hate you; and pray for them that 
persecute and calumniate you; that you may be the 
children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh 
His sun to rise upon the good and bad, and raineth upon 
the just and the unjust.” “Lord, how often,” asked 
St. Peter, “shall my brother offend against me, and I 
shall forgive him? till seven times?” “ I say not to thee, 
till seven times,” answered our Lord, “but till seventy 
times seven times.” 

The sublimest words that lips ever uttered were the 
words spoken by Our Saviour, dying on the cross for us 
whose sins nailed Him thereon: “Forgive them, Father, 
for they know not what they do.” A new spirit was 
born into the world, the strong and radiant spirit of 
forgiveness. 

A little while ago the United States was engaged in a 
gigantic and deadly war. Scarcely had the rattling 
hail of the machine guns ceased at the armistice of 
November, 1918, when a sharp cry of suffering from an 
enemy country broke on the air. “Save us or we 


FRIENDLINESS 


77 


perish!” And millions of dollars and many shiploads 
of food were gladly and generously sent by the American 
people to save the starving Austrian children and wo¬ 
men of Vienna. 

American boys of the north and of the south have 
often done guide duty at reunions of veterans, northern 
and southern, of the Civil War. Some of the old men 
whom you or other boys helped may have been present 
at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, 
when, after four years of a bitter death-struggle for 
what each side considered justice, the Civil War came 
to an end. 

The flower of the manhood of the South had fallen. 
The weakened remnant of General Lee’s brave army 
was hemmed in by walls of steel. He surrendered to 
General Grant, the northern commander, and in doing 
so offered, according to the custom, to give up his own 
sword and the horses of his soldiers. Grant refused 
both, saying: “The men will need their horses for the 
spring plowing,” and then ordered the issuance of 
25,000 rations to the starving Confederate army. 

In our own day we get glimpses of the same spirit of 
the Sermon on the Mount carried out, not only as in 
this last incident of the Civil War between honest and 
high-minded opponents, but even between an injured 
public and the convicted criminal. In our modern 
court and prison system our chief aim is not to seek 
revenge on the wrongdoer, not to demand an eye for 
an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but to treat the im¬ 
prisoned man humanely, to give him a helping hand, to 
coach and encourage him to get a new start in life. 
Parole, the honor system in prisons, opportunity to 
earn and save money and to learn a good trade during 
the time of confinement—these and many other 



78 


PLAY FAIR 


humane devices are being tried out more and more in 
various prisons of the country and are getting fine 
results. When all our prisons will have caught this 
spirit of humaneness and helpfulness, our prisons will, 
we hope, no longer be breeding places of crime and vice. 
We have made a beginning in the right direction, but 
much still remains to be done. 

The spirit of friendliness and forgiveness is the best 
American spirit. It is the Catholic spirit. A friend 
is one who thinks kindly, judges charitably, forgives 
readily, and shares generously. A friend never lets 
the sun set on a quarrel. He patches it up, or laughs 
it away, or forgets it. Any mollycoddle can sulk and 
resent. It takes a man to forgive and forget. 

A friend is a friend to everybody—to the folks at 
home, of course, first of all. Four walls and a roof 
make a house. It takes good will, good temper and 
good turns to make a home. Are you doing your part? 

A friend is a friend to all in his gang, his club, his 
team, his school, his community, his country. These 
are the other larger families of which he is a member. 

He is friend to the boy at school or on the playground 
who speaks English brokenly, whose parents have come 
to America from a foreign country, whether from the 
vine-clad slopes of the Mediterranean shores or from 
the land of the midnight sun. For all of us, of what¬ 
ever land or color or race or religion or language we be, 

. are of the great human family. We dwell together 
beneath the starry sky-roof of this round home of ours 
we call the world, and we all have one common father, 
Our Father in heaven. 

Unless we take food we starve. But we not only 
take food. We take it together , with our family, our 
friends, at home or on a hike or in camp, as a token of 
good feeling, of good fellowship, of friendliness. 


FRIENDLINESS 


79 


The night before He died for us, Our Saviour insti¬ 
tuted Holy Communion. “This is My body. This is 
My blood.” We receive Holy Communion as the 
food of our souls. But we receive together. The 
Blessed Eucharist was instituted at a supper of which 
the twelve Apostles partook. The first altar was a 



Courtesy of National Catholic Welfare Council 

HOLY COMMUNION IN CAMP 
The Sacrament of friendship and friendliness 


supper table as well as an altar. The altar in our parish 
church is still a table as well as an altar. The altar 
rail is only an extension of the altar to make room for 
the large numbers who receive. When we receive 
Holy Communion at the altar rail, we receive together 
with many—with rich and poor, with educated and un¬ 
educated, with American-born and foreign-born—as a 
token of friendship and brotherhood• with one another 
and with our divine Friend and Brother, Jesus Chris!. 




CHAPTER X 
Trustworthiness 

Lumbering in the northern woods is a man’s game. 
In the winter time, with the mercury often thirty or 
forty degrees below zero, the lumber jack is off to the 
woods before dawn. In the lake region, the logs may 
be brought to the lakes and piled up on the thick ice. 
When the spring thaw comes, the ice melts, and the logs 
are set afloat. They are drifted by the wind, or else 
towed or winched to the outlet of the lake, and start 
their trip downstream, here lazily lounging along the 
stretches of quiet water, and there bumping, thundering 
and rushing headlong down the boiling rapids. The 
spring drive has begun. 

The river driver with his long pike runs the logs, 
keeps the rapids clear, and breaks jams. He has to 
keep cool, decide quickly, act fearlessly, and be as 
agile as a cat. He works in teams, called shanty 
gangs, with a foreman at the head. Working miles 
away from civilization, the men do not dress in high 
hats or silk shirts. But you will go far to find a warmer 
or more hospitable welcome than the one that awaits 
you at a shanty gang camp. 

We had struck such a camp long after sundown one 
evening after a hard day’s portaging, paddling, riffle- 
wading, and rapid-running. We looked like tramps 
but got the welcome of princes. The next morning as 
we were packing our tent and dunnage, we found our 
leather axehead-sheath missing. Our host, the fore¬ 
man, saw us searching for it and made every inquiry, 
but we had to leave without it. His last word to us 


80 


TRUSTWORTHINESS 


81 


was: “If I find it, I’ll send it to you.” We told him 
not to bother, and in the excitement of a hard and 
dangerous trip down the river soon forgot all about it. 

Two weeks later, on our arrival back at headquarters, 
we found the sheath awaiting us, with a short note from 
the foreman expressing his regret that it had been 
stolen from us during our stay at his camp as his guest. 



Courtesy of U. S. Forest Service 


RIVER DRIVING 

Log running in the rapids is no game for mollycoddles 


Two men of the gang had quarreled with the foreman 
and quit camp cutting across country to the nearest 
town early in the morning before we were astir, taking 
our axehead cover with them simply to spite the gang. 
The foreman, suspecting the theft and the thieves, 
apparently sent a party of his men after them, to recover 
the bit of leather, notwithstanding the ten-mile start 






82 


PLAY FAIR 


afoot they had gotten. It must have taken the pursu¬ 
ing party two whole days to overtake the tw r o thieves, 
get from them the stolen property, and return to camp. 
All this great trouble and expense was gone to to recover 
a little axehead sheath worth not more than a quarter 
or fifty cents. 

If you had been in our place, you would of course 
have told your host what we told him: “Don’t bother 
about the trifle.’ 5 But, if you had been in his place, 
would you have done what he did? Why? 

By the way, time and agam I have seen these husky 
lumbermen, and their partners, the fire rangers and 
forest rangers, get down on their knees in the presence 
of the whole gang at night in their log shacks or in 
their tents to say their evening prayers before turning 
into their blankets. And it would have gone hard 
with any man present who would have attempted to 
make fun of them. But that is another story. 

A boy shies a nice slushy snowball at your head. 
Your eye sees it coming and wires a message to your 
brain: “Snowball coming double quick!” The brain 
sends a hurry command to the head and trunk muscles: 
“Dodge!” An auto is rapidly bearing down on you 
as you cross a crowded street. Another telegram from 
the eye to the brain: “Flivver at your heels!” The 
brain wires back to the leg muscles: “Jump!” You 
pick up a hot frying pan. Another rush telegram from 
the hand to the brain: “Ouch!” The brain telegraphs 
back at once: “Drop it!” 

If the wonderful telegraph system which God has 
installed in each one of us and which we call our nervous 
system were not trustworthy or truthful, how far 
should we get in life? How long should we be able to 
keep out of the hospital? 


TRUSTWORTHINESS 


83 


You get sick, the doctor comes and orders medicine. 
The druggist fills the prescription. If the druggist 
carelessly or villainously gave you wood alcohol in¬ 
stead of the cough syrup called for it is unlikely you 
would notice the difference until after you had drunk 
it. You take a train. If the engineer dozes at the 
throttle, you may soon find yourself in a wreck. A 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


SELF SERVICE ON THE HIKE 

If the packers and the food inspectors were not trustworthy, this boy’s 
lunch on potted tongue might be followed by a ride in an ambulance 


grocer sells you a couple of tins of sardines and potted 
ham for a hike. Should the packers have been unre¬ 
liable and dishonest, and the food inspectors careless, 
you might have to be brought home in an ambulance 
instead of coming back on shank’s mare. 

If you had paid good money to see a big league base¬ 
ball game, and found out that the players were throwing 





84 


PLAY FAIR 


the game instead of playing to win, how would you Peel 
about it? Did you ever get punished for something 
the other fellow who was guilty had lied out of? If 
you have caught another fellow in an outright lie, 
have you ever fully trusted him again? 

Trustworthiness, truthfulness, honor, are as necessary 
in life as your nervous system is in vour bodv. Without 
trustworthiness and mutual confidence, all the world 
would be one grand and glorious insane asylum, with the 
violent and criminal inmates running over the rest of us. 

Some lies of course do more harm than others. A 
‘white’ lie told to brag or to wriggle out of a scrape may 
not do so much harm as a ‘black’ lie told to ruin a 
man’s good name or business. But regardless of color 
or pattern,—white or black, green, yellow'or lavender, 
striped, polka dot or plaid,—a lie is a lie. Some pole¬ 
cats—if you have to speak of them at the dinner table, 
better call them wood pussies—are, for all I know, 
worse than others, but a polecat is a polecat. They 
are all of the same breed. Truthfulness and honor are 
the great cables on which the bridge of human society 
is suspended. Cut the cables, and the bridge falls. 

A Catholic boy who puts honor above convenience is 
trustworthy. He is faithful to a trust, cost what it 
may. lie keeps his word, come what will. He stands 
up for the truth, regardless of consequences. 

Indians, trappers, foresters, and rangers blaze trees 
to mark trails. Three smokes or three gunshots in 
the woods mean as clearly as words would: Danger, or 
Help! A handful of dust thrown up into the air says: 
“I have found it.” A boy who knows the codes can 
signal a long message with flags without uttering a 
word. So we can talk to God by gestures as well as 
words, as we do when we bless ourselves or make" a 



TRUSTWORTHINESS 


85 


genuflection. So too we can tell truth to other people 
with a nod, with a gesture, without uttering a word.' 
Between truthfulness by words and language and 
truthfulness by signs and gestures there is as much and 
no more difference than between twenty-five cents, 
two bits, and a quarter. 

A Catholic boy stands for the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth. And in doing so, he stands 
where his great Leader stands. In so standing, he will 
sometimes need to call on every ounce of courage in 
him, just as his divine Leader braved death itself 
for truth’s sake. 

Some pagan peoples have a very high standard of 
truthfulness. A man of the Veddas, a hunting tribe 
of Ceylon, on trial for his life, and accused of murder, 
instead of lying to escape punishment as he could 
safely and easily have done, simply said nothing. His 
tribe is proverbially truthful. Many other pagan 
peoples, and even the gods whom they worshipped, as 
among the Greeks, are described as having very low 
and loose standards of truth. Across this confusion, 
came the sharp-cut and lofty Christian standard: . 
“Speak ye the truth every man with his neighbor, for 
we are members one of another.” 

Our Lord, eternal Son of the Father of truth, hated a 
lie with a divine and infinite hatred. He hated not 
only the spoken lie, but as well the acted and lived lie 
we call sham, double dealing, hypocrisy. Contrast His 
gentle tone towards the woman taken in sin with His 
white-hot flaming indignation against the sham and 
hypocrisy of His day. 

“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; 
because you devour the houses of widows, praying 
long prayers. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and 


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swallow a camel. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites: because you make clean the outside of the 
cup and of the dish: but within you are full of rapine 
and uncleanliness. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees: 
because you are like to whitened sepulchres, which 
outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full 
of dead men’s bones and of all filthiness. You serpents, 
generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judg¬ 
ment of hell?” 

By keeping silent, by flattering and trimming and 
hedging, He could have curried favor with His powerful, 
resourceful, and cunning enemies. Instead He faced 
them, braved them publicly, openly, and aboveboard, 
and He cowed them into silence. 

He loved truth as deeply as He hated sham. When 
at His trial, the high priest Caiaphas demanded: “I 
adjure Thee by the living God that Thou tell us whether 
Thou be the Christ, the Son of God,” He could have 
saved His life by an evasion, by a half-truth. Instead 
He put truth above life, and died without flinching for 
the sake of truth, and honor. 

God trusts us. He puts us on our honor. He trusts 
us with the greatest trust a creature can have, with 
intelligent minds, strong hands, and free wills. They 
are like an inexhaustible store of dynamite. With 
them we can blast roads through the wilderness, clear 
fields for golden crops, quarry the rocks, mine precious 
metals from the heart of the earth. With them too we 
can wreck homes, destroy the bridges of life, wound, 
maim, and kill. In every good turn we do, in every 
truthful word we utter, in every act of loyalty, of 
obedience, of honesty, of purity, of reverence we per¬ 
form, we show Him that our honor can be relied upon, 
that we are worthy of the Great Trust. 


CHAPTER XI 

Honor 

• 

The score is tie, 7 to 7, in the last half of the ninth 
inning. Two men have fanned, and one has made 
second on a pass and a steal. The next man at bat 
drops a low fast one back of second to short center. 
The runner on second sprints home and scores just a 
foot or two ahead of the ball lined in from center. 
But, in sprinting home, he has deliberately cut third. 
The umpire, a friend of the runner, pretends he did not 
see him cut the base, and calls him safe. The game is 
over, 8 to 7. 

Was the game won ? Suppose you were on the team 
that got the small end of the score, how would you feel? 

Would you trust your money to a man who does not 
believe in standing up for and playing clean athletics? 
A good sport plays to win, dies hard when he dies, and 
refuses to die until he is dead. But are winning and 
good sportsmanship the same thing? What does real 
America think about it? 

Fifteen boys are lined up at the entrance to a movie. 
They have been waiting in line for half an hour. A 
sixteenth turns up and edges his way in between the 
second and third boy, instead of taking his turn at the 
end of the line. What would the crowd do to him? 
Would they send for a policeman—or the ambulance? 

Suppose your baseball or basketball or football team 
has played in a league and has fairly won the season’s 
championship pennant. Or suppose you have earned 
the school or college athletic letter after a season’s 
hard playing, or have been awarded the athletic badge 

87 



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after passing the standard tests. The pennant or 

letter or badge is worth something, isn’t it? Not so 

much in money value, but in a much higher value. 

You have earned it bv hard muscle-work and head- 

«/ 

work. But suppose any old team of milksops could 
by crooked playing get a pennant, or suppose any 
mollycoddle could by cheating get an athletic letter or 
badge, what would your pennant or letter or badge be 
worth? 

Cheating in a game or in a school exam is of course 
dishonorable, underhand, sneakish, dishonest, as we all 
know. But besides being dishonorable, is it fair play 
to the other fellow? If any sissy could get an athletic 
badge and if any numskull could get a school diploma 
by crooked work, would your hard-earned badge or 
diploma be worth anything? 

A decent fellow’s honor is to be trusted, and he 
believes in, stands up for, and fights for fair play. 

Listen closely on a still cloudy night in late April or 
in May, and you will hear faint mysterious cheeps 
coming down from sky land, seemingly from just a 
little above the roofs and treetops. You might at 
first take them for insect calls. But if the moon comes 
out from behind the clouds, and you turn a pair of 
field glasses or opera glasses on it, you will after a few 
minutes probably see winged figures rapidly pass by 
in a northerly direction sharply silhouetted in black 
against its silvery surface. The birds are on their 
spring migration. 

Many have come far distances, even from Central 
and lower South America. The Blackpoll Warbler, 
not as big as our common English Sparrow, comes from 
his winter home in northern South America, and nests 
north of the Canadian border up into Alaska and the 


HONOR 


89 


Arctic Circle. The shortest spring journey that any 
of the Blackpolls make is 3,500 miles and some of them 
probably travel twice that distance, mostly at night. 
Some birds even 
smaller than the 
Blackpoll, many of 
the brilliant black- 
and - salmon Red¬ 
starts for instance, 
regularly each 
spring make the 
great 700-m i 1 e 
flight, without stop¬ 
ping, across the Gulf 
of Mexico from 
Yucatan to the 
mouth of the Mis¬ 
sissippi. 

The Golden Plov¬ 
er, only slightly 
larger than a robin, 
spends the winter, 
which is sum m e r 
time there, in Pat¬ 
agonia, southern 
South America. 

Early in the new 
year, he starts north 
up through the heart 
of South America, 



A COURIER OF THE SKIES 

How does he find his way without trail or 
compass? 


crosses the Gulf of Mexico, follows roughly the Mis¬ 
sissippi valley, wings his way over the northern 
Canadian wilderness, and finally builds his nest on the 
arctic shores of North America and the neighboring 



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islands. The young are scarcely fledged, when he 
starts his return trip, by another route. He crosses to 
Labrador, and thence down to Nova Scotia. After 
feeding a while here, he mounts high in the air, and 
heading southward dares his great ocean journey far 
out of sight of land, and flies without a single moment’s 
rest to the Lesser Antilles or the northern shore of 
South America. He is well fed up and is extremely fat 
when he leaves Nova Scotia. No wonder he is ex¬ 
tremely thin when he arrives in South America. He 
has made an unbroken flight of 2,500 miles, nearly the 
distance from New York City to San Francisco! 

If you are master of your compass and of woodcraft, 
you can cut across wild country some few miles without 
going astray. The Golden Plover without compass 
cuts across land and sea, by day and night, for no less 
than 16,000 miles each year. All our modern science 
can tell us little about his secret. What mysterious 
power has been given him, and by whom? It makes us 
think of the ode to the wildfowl written by one of our 
American outdoor poets, Bryant. 

There is a Power whose care 
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, 

The desert and illimitable air— 

Lone wandering, but not lost. 

All day thy wings have fanned, 

At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere, 

Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, 

Though the dark night is near. 

He who, from zone to zone, 

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 

In the long way that I must tread alone, 

Will lead my steps aright. 


HONOR 


91 


Like a bird migrating, like a huge airplane, is our 
world racing swiftly and silently through space in its 
unceasing flight at the headlong speed of about 19 
miles a second. No compass guides its sky-flight but 
the compass of the laws given it by Him who guides 
the destinies of creation and holds the universe in the 
hollow of His hand. 

He is the invisible divine Aviator whose hand steers 
this giant world-airplane as it soars and whirls through 
space. He is as well its inventor, its maker, its creator. 
He guides it in His loving providence for us. He made 
it for us, His children, as our home and playground and 
workshop. 

God is the Father of us all in all lands: He plays no 
favorites. But, if ever a people were favored by Him, 
we Americans are that people. We are heirs to a new 
paradise scarcely less rich and wondrously beautiful 
than the paradise lost by our first parents’ fall. We 
are heirs to vast fertile plains and uplands watered by 
an intricate network of fertilizing streams and rivers; 
to majestic forests that lift their rugged trunks and 
leafy hands to the sky and that teem with all manner 
of furred and feathered folk; to a land whose depths 
are rich beyond measure with useful and precious 
minerals and metals. It is a farm, a ranch, a hunting 
and fishing ground, a workshop indeed wherein we earn 
our daily bread by the sweat of our brows, but it is 
also a home, a playground, a campground of bewitching 
beauty. 

Soil, water, forests, minerals, metals, fish, birds, 
mammals,—on these abundant resources with which 
we are blessed, are built our national prosperity, our 
wealth. But something more is built upon them. 
Our very lives depend upon them. The real question 



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is not: “How much money are they worth?” The real 
question is: “How many human lives and homes are 
they worth?” Without food and clothing and shelter, 
without heat and light and power, we cannot live. 
They are the necessities of life. These necessities of 
life are drawn from our natural resources. They have 
been given to us in unsurpassed abundance by the 
Giver of all good things. Or rather, they are put in our 
trust. We are to use them and safeguard them, not for 
ourselves alone selfishly, but for the millions and mil¬ 
lions who will come after us, and who will have to 
depend on them for food and clothing and shelter after 
we are dead and gone, just as we depend upon them 
now. They are a sacred trust. 

A good friend of boys gives all the boys and boys’ 
clubs in your state an ideal island as a summer camp. 
It is agreed that the boys are to go there in turns for 
two weeks each. When your club or crowd arrives, 
you find that the gang that preceded you has left the 
camp in a mess. Rusty tin cans litter the ground. 
The air is thick with the foul stench from kitchen 
remains. The place swarms with disease-carrying flies. 
Refuse has been thrown into the spring. The nearby 
woods are black and charred from unguarded and un¬ 
quenched campfires. A hole has been punched into 
the rowboat, and the oars hacked to make a tentpole. 
The springboard has been chopped up for firewood, 
and broken bottles have been thrown into the swimming 
hole. What would you say? If you wanted to be 
very polite, you might call the gang that went before 
you vandals. But if you wanted to come nearer to the 
truth, you would have to call them what they were, 
hogs. 

It is part of camp honor to keep the camp clean, 


HONOR 


' 93 

sanitary, shipshape. It is still more a matter of honor 
to leave it clean, sanitary, and shipshape for the next 
campers who come. 

A Good Friend has given us all this wonderful camp¬ 
ing ground we call our country. He has given it to us, 
and to those who will come after us. Enjoy it, He 
tells us, but He has put us on our honor to leave it 
and its comforts and beauties intact and bettered 
for the campers who will come after us until the end 
of time. 

Many of those who have gone before us in America 
seemed to have the idea that our country was so vast 
and our resources so exhaustless that they could 
afford to be wasteful, careless, reckless. Other thor¬ 
oughly selfish men have played the hog. To no small 
extent they have skimmed off the cream, and left only 
the thin milk. Yet these natural resources belong to 
us, the people. They have been given to us by our 
Good Friend. When they are wasted, whether from 
ignorance or carelessness or selfish greed, we and our 
children are wronged. Our rights are attacked. 

In another century or two our supplies of coal and 
iron will be nearly exhausted if we continue our present 
increasing rate of output. And our store of other mineral 
fuels and metals, while great, is far more limited than 
most people imagine. Five-sixths of our virgin forest 
land is already destroyed or badly slashed, largely as a 
result of wasteful and greedy cutting and preventable 
destructive forest fires. Gold-worshipping men would 
today chop down ruthlessly for a few paltry dollars, did 
our government not call a halt, even the venerable 
patriarchs of our California forests, the Giant Sequoias, 
some of which are so big that a stage coach can be 
driven through their tunnelled trunks, and some of 


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which were already two or three thousand years old 
when Christ was born. 

Great patches of farm land, totalling hundreds of 
thousands of acres, are worn out and almost as barren 
as the Sahara Desert. The buffalo and the fur seal 
have barely been saved from utter destruction, and 
some of our wild birds, like the White Egret, are even 
now threatened with extinction as absolute as that 
which has overtaken the Passenger Pigeon. The last 
known survivor of the Passenger Pigeons died recently 
at the Cincinnati zoo. Yet in 1808, one flock alone, 
seen in Kentucky, blackened the sky for miles and 
numbered, it was estimated, more than two billion 
individuals, and as late as 1877 a Michigan nesting site 
of the Passenger Pigeon extended over an area twenty- 
eight miles long and averaging three to four miles 
wide, throughout the whole of which area the birds 
were almost as thick on the trees as acorns on an oak. 

Our resources are great, but limited. We hold them 
as a trust of justice and of honor. We must safeguard 
our trust. 

Far-sighted and high-minded men have raised their 
voices in indignant protest against waste, and in im¬ 
passioned pleas for conservation. No one has spoken 
and acted more energetically that the great friend of 
athletics and outdoor life, Theodore Roosevelt, whom 
perhaps we should call the Father of Conservation as 
we call George Washington the Father of our Country. 
Many federal and state bureaus and departments are 
doing heroic work to save the forests, to remake our 
worn-out soils, to reclaim the deserts and make them 
blossom like the rose, to husband our mineral resources, 
to protect our wild life. The fight is on. The greedy 
and selfish are dying hard. Even as I write, men whose 


HONOR 


95 



FOREST GIANTS 


The American people are gradually winning their fight to save 
the lives of these patriarchs of the forest 

a few thousand dollars, some of the unsurpassed beauties 
of the Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite, and Crater Lake 
National Parks would be sacrificed to selfish greed. 


flag is a dollar mark instead of the stars and stripes are 
trying to drive a wedge into our people’s playgrounds, 
the national parks. Should they have their way, for 


Courtesy ol XJ. S. Forest Service 






96 


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In this great work of trust, this labor of love and 
justice and honor, the American boy will have a fighting 
part to play as he comes to fuller manhood. But it is 
not necessary to wait that long. Hundreds of Amer¬ 
ican boys are already in the game, and are playing their 
part as citizens with credit. Every time a boy 
quenches his camp-fire carefully or helps fight a forest- 
fire; every time he chops up an old stump or a fallen 
tree for firewood instead of felling a standing live tree; 
every time he works a garden plot intelligently; every 
time he sets himself to ferret out the hidden secrets of 
wild animal ways instead of killing wild things them¬ 
selves; every time he loyally obeys the game laws of 
his state; every time he destroys a harmful weed or 
insect, or lends a helping hand to the birds, our indus¬ 
trious weed-killers and insect-destroyers, by building 
a food table or a drinking fount for them or by putting 
up a bird box,—he is helping along the big work of 
conservation. He is being loyal to the trust that God 
and his country have put in him. Conserving our 
resources is not merely a commercial and money¬ 
making task. Food and shelter and clothing for our 
children and our children's children forever, their 
welfare and happiness and life, are entrusted by God 
and by America to us. We are on our honor. 


CHAPTER XII 

The Square Deal 

The spring thaw had begun in the great northern 
wilderness. Throughout the unusually severe winter, 
the lakes had been sheeted with thick ice as hard as 
steel armor plate. The Hudson Bay Company fur 
trading post had been closed and barred up in the fall. 
When the post factor returned to open for the spring 
trading, he noticed a single snowshoe trail leading up 
to and away from the log hut where were stored quan¬ 
tities of flour, sugar, tea, and woolens kept there to 
exchange with the Indian trappers for pelts of fox and 
beaver and mink and other fur-bearers. Entering he 
found a sack of flour missing. A theft had never 
occurred before in his memory. 

The post was reopened. Some weeks passed. One 
day, a lone Indian stalked into the post and laid down 
a bundle of valuable pelts. “These are for you,” 
he said to the factor. “In the late winter, the snow 
was deep. The hunting was bad. I had nothing to 
eat. I was starving. To save my life and the lives 
of my children, I took a sack of flour from the hut. 
Here is your pay for it.” 

I do not know the name of tjie Indian, nor even the 
name of the tribe and the place. I tell you the story 
as I read it some years ago. I do know that this is 
exactly what you would expect a northern Indian to do. 

One day, while cruising by canoe in the hunting 
grounds of one of these northern tribes, the Tetes de 
Boules, we pitched our tent for the night at an Indian 
camping site much used by them, although there was 

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no one else at the place at the time. Scouting around 
for firewood, we spied at the edge of the small cleared 
space, a platform about five feet high made of four 
uprights and some cross-sticks. The platform was 
not hidden, but quite in the open. Any one camping 



The valuables left in this cache at the Tete de Boule camping ground 
were as safe as if they had been deposited in a bank vault 


there would be sure to see it. On it were snowshoes 
and woolen clothing loosely covered with a strip of 
birch bark lashed on with light thongs of hide. The 
platform with its precious load was what we call a cache. 

With the coming of the warm spring w r eather, the 
owners of the snowshoes and woolen clothing would 





















THE SQUARE DEAL 


99 


not need them. So they had placed them on the plat¬ 
form and covered them merely to protect them against 
storms, rain, and wild animals. The owners would 
return for their cache in the fall. During the summer, 
they would be miles and miles away. Probably a 



A NORTHERN INDIAN 

The Indians of the northern woods are noted for their honesty. This 
one, Joe Odjick, had, when we met him, just finished carrying his 
birch canoe and heavy pack over a six-mile portage in a single trip 


hundred Indians would camp at this site during the hot 
months, but the cached valuables are as safe as if they 
were in a bank vault equipped with burglar alarms. 
Yet these people are extremely poor. I have never 
seen a more needy and poverty-stricken tribe. 

While camping with them at another point, we would 
wander off from our tent and leave all our dunnage 
scattered around loose. The Indian boys were playing 
a game of ball, quite unlike our baseball, outside our 










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tent. But not a single thing of ours was touched by 
anyone, young or old. 

All peoples the world over have a sense of honor and 
honesty, and some of them like our northern Indians, 
have a very high one. Among a good many non- 
Christian tribes and nations, however, a clever theft 
or robbery committed against strangers and enemies 
is winked at or even approved and commended. 
Christianity takes its stand on the ideal of absolute 
honor and honesty, to stranger and enemy as well as 
to fellow-citizen and friend. Its unbending standard 
is: Justice to all; fair play and the square deal to every 
man, friend or foe; to every man his rights. “As you 
would that men should do to you, do you also to them 
in like manner.” 

Honesty is usually said to be the best policy. Most 
honest people agree that it is, although some burglars 
and pickpockets do not seem to get the idea until 
Sherlock Holmes slips the handcuffs on them. But the 
man who acts honestly merely because honesty is good 
policy is not honest at all in his heart. A square man 
not only scorns thieving because thieving is poor 
policy. He is figlitingly honest. He stands for our 
Leader's golden rule: Do to others as you would want 
others to do to you. Respect and treat other people’s 
belongings as you want your own to be respected and 
treated. 

A boys’ club has saved up for a whole year to buy a 
first-class camping equipment,—tents, cots, blankets, 
pails, pans, tableware and the rest. Each boy in the 
club can say: “These are ours.'’ So you and I can 
say of such things as the public schools and their 
equipment, of public buildings and parks, of the very 
street lamps: “These are ours.” 


THE SQUARE DEAL 


101 


If some vandal should wilfully rip up with his jack¬ 
knife one of your club tents, he would be doing an 
injury to every boy in your club, would he not? If 
some vandal wilfully defaces a public building with 
mud or chalk or breaks up playground equipment or 
destroys flower beds in the park or smashes a street 
lamp, does he do an injury to the “city” or the “govern- 
• ment,” or to you and me and every other citizen? 
Would you consider that the jack-knife artist who 
carves his name on public property is giving his fellows 
a square deal? 

The dues of your club are collected to cover the 
running expenses of the club. Everybody has chipped 
in his share. The money belongs to everybody equally. 
Each boy in the club or gang can say: “It is ours.” 
If you saw somebody coolly helping himself to your club 
funds, would you sit quiet, fold your arms, and grin? 
In our political democracy we all pay dues. We call 
them taxes. Rich and poor chip in their share of the 
public funds. Some of these taxes we pay very in¬ 
directly, some very directly as in the case of the war 
tax on soda water and ice cream cones. The public 
money belongs to everybody equally. Each citizen 
can say: “It is ours.” When corrupt politicians graft 
or waste or misspend the people’s money—yours and 
mine—do you think it is a good plan for us to grin and 
submit while they coolly rifle our pockets? 

You have come honestly through gift or purchase or 
hard work to be the owner of a pencil, a penknife, a 
watch, a football, an overcoat, a sweater, a dollar bill, 
a ticket to the ball game, or what not. You can say: 
“These are mine.” Should somebody knock you down 
and take any of them away from you, or should he 
trick you out of them in an underhand way, you are 



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wronged, are you not? If he takes your pencil, he 
would be doing you a lesser wrong, and committing a 
venial sin. If he takes your valuable gold watch or 
overcoat, he would be doing you a greater wrong, and 
committing a mortal sin. But in both cases, your 
just rights are trampled upon. 



Photo by L. J. Goldman. Courtesy of U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey 


OUTLAWS 

These two wolves did not believe in the square deal. Timber wolves and 
coyotes kill much live stock and wild game. Last year the Biological 
Survey’s expert riflemen and trappers outwitted and treated rough about 
80,000 such pirates of the woods and plains 


A Catholic boy stands for the square deal. He 
begins by being honest with small things. He scrupu¬ 
lously returns borrowed things. He does not wait for 
the owner of lost property to hunt out the finder. He 
looks up the ‘Lost and Found’ column in the news¬ 
paper. He hunts out the loser. He does not wait for 
the conductor to tap him on the shoulder for the car¬ 
fare. He sees that the conductor gets it. If given too 





THE SQUARE DEAL 


103 


much change in a store by mistake lie will spare no 
pains to return it, if it be only a cent. He is not only 
honest to exactness; he will go through fire and water 
to keep up to his high standard of honor and honesty. 

By the way, do you think our Indian friend who took 
the sack of flour to save his children’s and his own life 
had really ‘stolen’ it? He intended of course to return 
its value at the first opportunity. If I owned a bakery 
and refused to give bread to a man who was starving to 
death, have I done an injustice to him as well as an 
unkindness? May I always and at all times do what¬ 
soever I please with what belongs to me, regardless of 
my neighbor’s suffering or need? Or are there times 
when my right to my property has to give way to my 
neighbor’s right to his life? Which is the higher and 
the deeper right in the sight of God and man, the right 
to property or the right to life? Should the laws of the 
land manifest more acute and keen interest in human 
life than in human property? Diseases among hogs 
and cattle have resulted in great money loss to breeders 
and ranchmen. Large sums of money are spent annu¬ 
ally by the government to prevent and check such 
diseases. It is money well spent. What should we 
do to prevent and check diseases among grown folks 
and children? Would it be fair to put the question 
this way: Who are worth more, men or cattle, children 
or hogs? Think it over. 


CHAPTER XIII 
The Flag of Justice 

Once upon a time, not long ago and not in a far land, 
so the story runs, a prosperous business man in a big 
city took his son aside one day and said to him: “My 
son, to-day is your twenty-first birthday. You are now 
of age. You have clerked for me for the last two years. 
Now I am going to make you my partner in business. 

“Our firm, you know, is one of the oldest and most 
respectable ones in this city. We have always stood 
for honest dealing. We have kept up fixed standards 
of honest business. We have an unspotted reputation 
for honesty. I expect you to carry on the high tra¬ 
ditions of our firm. 

“But, my son, before you take up your actual work 
as partner, I want you to spend a whole year studying 
business law. After you have mastered it, you will be 
surprised what a lot of things you can do, and still 
remain honest!” 

Another story—this one not a parable, but an incident 
from real life, that occurred only a few weeks ago. 
The name and address of the young fellow are omitted, 
but can be furnished on request. We shall call him 
Murphy for short. Murphy is twenty-one, a book¬ 
keeper by profession, a practical Catholic and a fine 
type of American. He had been out of work a long 
time through no fault of his own. At last, he got a 
job. His first day at his desk, he was told by his new 
employer to make an entry in the books that looked a 
little crooked. He thought it over, as he did not want 
to judge his employer unfairly. 

104 


THE FLAG OF JUSTICE 


105 


The next day, he was told to make another entry, of 
the dishonesty of which he could have no doubt, 
although his employer had so safeguarded the business 
transaction as to evade the law’s clutches. 

Murphy acted on sight and hit straight from the 
shoulder. “I quit here and now,” he told the man. 
“I came to do honest work and to give you honest 
services. I need a situation and I need one badly, 
but if you offered me ten thousand times what you are 
offering me now, I would not do such work!” And 
with that parting shot, he took his hat and walked out. 

Murphy was fightingly fair and square. The word 
‘fightingly’ is a little clumsy, and you will not find it 
in the dictionary, but you know what it means. And 
he did not stop short at being ‘legally’ honest. Not 
everything the law allows is honest. A profiteer, for 
instance, who has charged you four dollars for a 
sweater that is worth only a dollar and a half can with 
difficulty if at all be forced by law to disgorge his dis¬ 
honest profits. 

There is but one law that meets the demands of 
perfect justice in all cases and that can never be fooled 
or hoodwinked. That law is God’s eternal law of 
justice written in our hearts and proclaimed by Our 
Lord and His Church. Our human laws, our American 
laws, are built upon this eternal law of God, and many 
of the best men of the country are straining every 
nerve to make them as perfect as human laws can be. 
We are succeeding pretty well, but in the great game 
against the team of sharp-witted crooks, jailed and 
unjailed, we shall ever have to exercise keen eyesight, 
strong arms, quick action, high intelligence, bulldog 
courage, and first-class teamwork. In the fight for 
justice and fair play, however, God and the great mass 


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of Americans and the square business men of the 
country are on our side. 

Starving people might be glad to kill cats and dogs 
and horses and eat them. Most of us who are not 
starving would rather not. If you bought at a store 
a tin of beef, are you sure you could tell by the taste 
that it was really beef and not horse meat? Our laws 



Courtesy of U. S. Bureau of Standards 


JUSTICE IN TRADE 

The American people through their Bureau of Standards aim to give justice 
to all, to buyers and sellers, while state inspectors of weights and measures 
protect all of us against trade dishonesties like that illustrated above 


demand honest labeling of food, meat, groceries, and 
canned and prepared vegetables and fruits. And 
there is a strong movement afoot working for further 
laws that will guarantee that cloths and such things 
are what they are sold for,—that, for instance, the 
woolen overcoat or socks or blankets that you buy are 
really wool and not cheap shoddy. 










THE FLAG OF JUSTICE 


107 


Other laws are passed to see that all of us, particularly 
the poor, are given full weight and measure when we 
buy coal or ice or groceries or meat. At the Bureau of 
Standards at Washington are scores of experts working 
week in and week out testing all sorts of things from 
radium to writing paper in the interest of justice to 
all buyers. Food inspectors and inspectors of weights 
and measures are constantly going the rounds to protect 
us against fraud. In a European country we once 
bought a box of matches which turned out to be only 
. one-half full. On the inner fold of the box was printed 
the brassy motto: “The public likes to be fooled!” 
It was only a one-cent box of matches, but the crafty 
manufacturer would receive short shrift in America, 
if he tried this trick here. 

Suppose you earn five dollars and put it in a savings 
bank. Or think of the working man or woman who 
has stinted and scrimped for years to save and deposit 
in bank a little money to keep from going over the hill 
to the poor house in old age. What if the bank should 
fail? Banks are now strictly controlled by laws and 
the government to safeguard depositors. Banking 
losses still occur, it is true, in spite of laws, but such 
losses are much less common than they used to be. 

And so in many ways, good laws are protecting the 
honest, the poor, the thoughtless, the innocent, the 
defenceless, the weak, and the ignorant against the 
tricks and wiles of the underhand, the crafty, the 
swindler, and the sneak-thief. But the biggest job 
we, the people, have ever tackled is the one of seeing 
that justice is done to employers, employees, and con¬ 
sumers, to capital, labor and the consuming public, 
and that fair profits, fair wages, and fair prices prevail. 

Far back in the thirteenth century, more than two 


108 


PLAY FAIR 


hundred years before Columbus sailed across the 
Atlantic, there lived a famous scientist, a Franciscan 
friar, Robert Bacon. “Art,” he wrote, “can construct 
instruments of navigation such that the largest vessels 
governed by a single man will traverse rivers and seas 
more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. 
One may also make carriages which without the aid of any 
animal will run with remarkable swiftness.” Of course 
most people thought he was crazy, a dreamer. But Friar 
Bacon was merely centuries ahead of his time as a scien¬ 
tist. Our great warships and ocean liners, our flivvers 
and auto trucks are the fulfilment of his prophecy. 

A dull throbbing whirr is heard above your head, 
but airplanes are now so common that you hardly stop 
a moment to look up in the sky at the winged speck 
from whose engine the sound has come. The horse 
has given way to the railroad, the electric tram, and 
the automobile. Over the old horseshoer's and black¬ 
smith’s shop now hangs the sign: Auto Repairing. 
The spinning wheel is rarely to be seen outside of 
museums and curio shops, and in its stead enormous 
textile mills turn out the cloth from which your coat 
is made. Even on the farms the horse-drawn plow is 
making place for the power-driven tractor. 

We live in the age of machinery. And the wizard, 
machinery, has by the wave of his magic wand, in a 
little more than a century, wrought changes in our 
civilization far more wonderful than turning pigs into 
ponies and cabins into castles. Nor has machinery 
always played the part of a good fairy. 

In our histories we read about George Washington’s 
axe, but not much about his shoes. When a boy 
needed a new pair of shoes in those days, he would 
probably go to the village shoemaker. 


THE FLAG OF JUSTICE 


109 


The ordinary shoemaker owned his own simple 
tools as well as his shop. His one-room shop was 
within or alongside his home. He knew all about 
making shoes from A to Z. He had an assistant per¬ 
haps or a couple of young apprentices who were learn¬ 
ing the trade. They sat side by side with him on the 
same low bench, and boarded and ate at table with 
him, and w r ere on intimate, friendly, and democratic 
terms with him. He made a little more money, but 
not much more, than did his helpers and employes. 
His customers knew him and he knew them, and the 
village gossips would talk unless he paid and treated 
his employes w T ell. He bought his leather from the 
nearby farmers and tanners and sold his finished shoes 
to the customers who came in person to his shop. 

To-day, if you want a new pair of shoes, you go to a 
store and buy them ready-made. The shoes you are 
now wearing may have traveled thousands of miles 
before you traveled one block in them. The leather 
may have come from the Argentine Republic or the 
western American ranches, and the raw material may 
have been made up into shoes in a New England factory. 

You have never seen the men who made your shoes, 
nor do you probably even know in what city they were 
made. Before the raw material becomes a finished 
shoe, it has to pass through about a hundred different 
processes. A worker in a shoe factory may know only 
one of these processes, such, for instance, as operating 
an eyelet-punching machine. The employe in the shoe 
factory will not know personally the owner of the 
factory. Indeed the owners may be a hundred stock¬ 
holders scattered over the continent from Maine to 
California. 

The tools are not a small set of awls, knives, hammers, 


110 


PLAY FAIR 


rasps, and so forth that could be bought for a few 
dollars, but elaborate and expensive machinery that 
cost perhaps a half million or a million dollars. 

What has taken place in the shoemaking industry, 
has taken place or is taking place in nearly every other 



(g Ry \Y. C. Persons 

THE AGE OF MACHINERY 


The village blacksmith’s shop has given place to the great mills and foun¬ 
dries. Machinery has changed man’s ways and touched his welfare more 
than have the wars and revolutions of history 


industry. Even such things as dairying and butter¬ 
making, once as much a part of the household duties 
as cooking and dishwashing, have in our cities entirely 
passed out of the home into large establishments. It 
is very inconvenient keeping cows in city flats and 




THE FLAG OF JUSTICE 


111 


apartments. They get in our way. I .was told 
recently of a city-bred boy who on his first visit to the 
country had been watching the cow being milked. 
On being offered a glass of milk, he promptly replied: 
“No, thank you. You can’t fool me. That’s not 
milk. Milk comes out of bottles!” 

Largely, therefore, as a result of the introduction of 



Courtesy of Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions 


THE WOODCUTTER 

The pioneer or the farmer can gather his own fuel within five minutes’ walk 
from his home. Can you? He is independent. A coal strike or a tie-up 
of the railroads would not bother him so much. But how would you and I 

suffer? 

costly machinery to do our work for us, the ownership 
of tools has to a great extent passed from the hands of 
the workers; industries themselves have to an equal 
extent passed from the home or home-shop to the mill 
and factory; employer, employe, and consumer have 
drifted out of personal touch with one another; raw 
materials and finished products are very often trans¬ 
ported great distances, by land and sea. 


112 


PLAY FAIR 


The division of labor has made us more and more 
dependent on one another. For instance, in pioneer 
days our forefathers could within five minutes’ walk of 
their home cut their own firewood for heating and 
cooking. They were independent. Today a break¬ 
down of a railroad system or a prolonged strike in the 
coal mines would cause hundreds of thousands in our 
towns and cities to shiver from cold, and would close 
perhaps thousands of factories and throw hundreds of 
thousands out of work. This is one of the reasons why 
we have to have so many laws regarding factories, 
mines, railroads, capital, and labor. We are all con¬ 
cerned deeply. 

The rise of our modern industrial system, whose fea¬ 
tures we have just reviewed, brought great prosperity, 
but prosperity of a one-sided kind. The wealthy 
became wealthier, and the poor became poorer. Con¬ 
trast for example some of the magnificent palaces in 
our fashionable city residential sections with the 
crowded tenements and ramshackle hovels in the slums. 
In Washington’s day a man was rich who possessed 
fifty thousand dollars. Today our millionaires are 
numbered by the thousand, and our multi-millionaires 
by the hundred. 

The poor became poorer. The wages of the working 
man became insufficient for the needs of his family and 
himself. Even by the strictest economy he could not 
make both ends meet. In his desperate attempt to 
feed and clothe and shelter his wife and his children he 
failed. So wives, and mothers, and children of tender 
years were drafted by industry and were forced, in 
order to get the bare necessities of life, to seek employ¬ 
ment in the mills and factories and stores. At one 
period, women working in English mines w T ere actually 
harnessed to carts, as we harness mules. Here in a 


THE FLAG OF JUSTICE 


113 


nutshell we have three great modern problems which 
are giving our American citizens more thought perhaps 
than anything else, and on the fair solution of which 
will depend the welfare of our republic: wages, woman 
labor, and child labor. 

Good turns and works of mercy are splendid things. 
But justice comes even before charity. And unless 
fair dealing and justice to all be our guiding star, all 
the good turns and all the works of mercy and all the 
charity in the world will not avail. “A country is not 
made great by the number of square miles it contains, 
but by the number of square people it contains.” 

St. Joseph was a working man, a carpenter, and so 
too was Our Lord Himself. St. Paul was a tent-maker. 
The Roman paganism of Our Lord’s day despised the 
laborer. “The mechanic’s occupation,” wrote Cicero, 
“is degrading. A workshop is incompatible with any¬ 
thing noble.” Our Lord gave back to labor its lofty 
dignity. And St. Paul even says: “If any man will 
not work neither let him eat.” 

The laborer is worthy of his hire. Man has the right 
to life, and right to life is more than the right to prop¬ 
erty. Human life is more sacred than human property. 
If therefore I employ a man to work for me, I am in 
conscience bound to give him a living wage, that is, 
sufficient wages to support himself and his dependent 
family in decency. 

For these two things above all does the Catholic 
Church stand: the dignity of all labor however humble 
it may be, and the right of the laborer to a living wage. 
The great fight for justice is on, justice to employer, 
employe, and consumer. A Catholic must know what 
it is all about, roll up his sleeves, and Tvade in. We 
cannot be mere fans. We must get into the game. 
Our place is not on the bleachers, but on the diamond. 


CHAPTER XIV 
Your Health 

The Indians of a number of tribes in the United 
States, when they pass you on the trail, greet you, not 
with our familiar “How are you?” or “How do you 
do?” but with the single word “Hao!” A California 
Miw T ok Indian would say: “Whence do you come? 
What are you at?” The ancient Greeks used the 
greeting, “Be glad!” the Hebrews, “Peace!” the 
modern Arabs, “Peace be unto you!” or “The peace 
(of God) be on you!” 

If two Japanese meet in the morning, they say, 
“Honorably early!”; if later, “To-day!”; if in the 
evening, “Honorably rest!” In China, a common 
greeting is: “One day not see like three falls!” which 
means, “If I do not see you for a day, it is like three 
years!” 

All peoples have courteous greetings that breathe a 
wish or prayer for the happiness, peace, or well-being 
of the greeted. In rural Ireland a frequent salutation 
on entering a house was and in places still is: “God 
save all here!” to which those present reply: “God 
save you kindly, sir!” One of our most common 
American greetings is: “How are you?” or “How is 
your health?” Americans put a high value on robust 
health and strong bodies. And so too does the Catholic 
Church. 

On the night before Our Lord’s death, a mob guided 
by Judas the traitor came to the Garden of Olives at 
midnight to arrest Him. St. Peter drew his sword to 
defend his Leader by brute force single-handed against 

14 


YOUR HEALTH 


115 


the armed mob, but Our Lord said to him: “Put up 
again thy sword in its place. Thinkest thou that I 
cannot ask My Father, and He will give me presently 
twelve legions of Angels.” 

The Angels, strong, swift, mighty, loyal, kindly, 
brave spirits,—these are the knights of God, the 
couriers of heaven, the defenders of the defenceless, our 
own helpmates and older brothers, given us by our 
Father, “Humble because of knowledge, mighty by 
sacrifice.” 

To us as to them God has given a soul, the light of 
reason, and the trust of honor we call free-will. Like 
them we are made to the image and likeness of God, 
with an immortal soul, a reasoning mind, and a free¬ 
will. Spirit, knowledge, love—here is a trinity within 
our own souls, reflecting the divine Trinity above as the 
glassy surface of a lake reflects the stars in heaven— 
the eternal Father, unbegotten; the divine Word, the 
only begotten Son; the everlasting Spirit of Love, the 
Holy Ghost, who proceeds from the Father and the 
Son; three persons, yet one supreme, all-knowing, all- 
loving God. The nearest image of the Trinity in the 
universe is not the clover-leaf or the triangle, but the 
trinity of spirit, knowledge and love within your own 
one soul. 

Thus we are kith and kin, blood-relations, to the 
universe. Children of God in whose image we are made, 
our souls make us brothers to the princely angels of the 
Most High, our bodies make us brothers to the lowly 
beasts of the field. 

“And God said: Let us make man to our image and 
likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of 
the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the 
whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth 



116 


PLAY FAIR 


upon the earth. And the Lord God formed man of 
the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the 
breath of life, and man became a living soul.” 

We, like the beasts of the field, have bodies that die. 
“Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” can 
be said of both us and them. Some say that as our 
bodies and theirs return in a roundabout way to dust, 
so in a roundabout way our bodies and theirs have 
evolved or developed from a common origin, before the 
days of Adam. It is a question the Church and the 
scientists must settle. But one thing is clear. Man 
was directly created by God, and given dominion over 
the earth and to man alone was given an immortal 
soul with reason and free-will. Between the most 
intelligent animal and the least civilized man, yawns a 
chasm as broad as the Grand Canon. 

Perhaps the most intelligent animal of recent times 
was a horse called ‘Clever Hans.’ He may be living 
still. It was thought at first that he could add, sub¬ 
tract, multiply and divide. They would ask him, for 
instance, “How much is six divided by three, multiplied 
by two, plus six, minus four?” and he would stamp on 
the ground the correct number of times,—in this case, 
six. Long experiments by expert scientists, however, 
showed at last that he could not really count at all, but 
that he got the cue to the right answer by little nods 
of the head given unknowingly by the questioner,— 
just as a boy in school who has not studied his lesson 
and knows nothing whatever about it, will, when ques¬ 
tioned, answer correctly, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ if another boy 
gives him the right nod. 

On the other hand, the lowliest tribes on earth have 
souls, reason and free-will, as truly as the great inventor 
or the captain of finance. 



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PLAY FA III 


We hear a good deal about tlie ways of the caveman. 
In far ancient times, thousands of years ago, long be¬ 
fore the dawn of civilization, the early men of Europe 
lived very simple lives. They camped along the river 
banks or in caves or beneath the shelter of overhanging 
rocks. They made their axes and hammers and spear¬ 
heads of stone, for they did not know how to smelt ores 
and forge metals. They hunted and fished for dinner, 
because they had no gardens or farms or cattle. From 
the few meager remains that have survived the wreck 
of centuries, we know that they had religious ideas of 
the future life at least, and that some of them were 
gifted painters and sculptors, and that they were highly 
skilled handicraftsmen. If you think it is easy to make 
a chipped stone knife-blade, take a quartzite boulder 
some time and try it. I have tried. If I kept practis¬ 
ing for some months, I should hope to succeed fairly 
well, but I have not succeeded yet. 

Plain living may go hand in hand with high thinking. 
There are tribes living today on wild and out-of-the- 
way islands and in remote jungle and mountain fast¬ 
nesses who are no more advanced than our early an¬ 
cestors in Europe, tribes that have no fixed villages, 
no crops, no gardens, no cattle, tribes that do not 
know reading or writing or long division. 

Take, for instance, the natives of the Andaman 
Islands in the Indian Ocean. They do not even know 
how to make fire, but when on the march carry a 
smoldering ember or brand wrapped in green leaves. 
Yet no northern trapper, no outdoor sportsman, no 
American editor of an outdoor magazine knows more 
about woodcraft or wild animal ways or tracking or 
hunting than do they. Roosevelt or John Burroughs 
would have had a lot to learn from them. Not only 


YOUR HEALTH 


119 


that, but they have a clear belief in a kind, just and 
merciful God and in a future life. Their home life is 
almost ideal. A man may have only one wife. There 
is no divorce, and the mothers and children are most 
kindly and affectionately treated by the fathers. 
These simple folks are peaceful and cheerful, courage¬ 
ous and brave, hospitable, trustworthy, kindly and 
truthful and honest. There is no reason to suppose 
that the 4 cave men ’ were otherwise. 

The Andamanese children, when sent to school with 
white children, hold their own very well, and learn 
quickly our language, the three R’s, and our arts and 
trades. Yet the dog, our faithful companion of sport 
and play and labor, although he has been with man for 
thousands of years, is seemingly not a whit more intelli¬ 
gent than his wild ancestors of the wolf tribe. Ask 
any expert trapper or hunter what he thinks of the 
cunning, say, of the timber wolf. In spite of many canoe 
trips through country thickly infested with timber 
wolves, where at night we would hear their barks and 
howls within gunshot, they have been so clever and 
wary that they never gave us even a moment’s glimpse 
of their gray pelts. 

We are kin by our bodies to the beasts of the field. 
They are our humble brothers in blood. We owe them 
kindness and gentle treatment. But man alone has 
received from His Father in heaven an immortal soul. 
He wanted us to share with Him eternal happiness. 
Out of His love for us and His kindly wish for our 
happiness has He created us. 

At death, body and soul are separated for a time, to 
be united again for eternity at the Last Judgment. 
So we pray in the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the 
resurrection of the body.” But on earth our bodies are 


120 


PLAY FAIR 


the faithful and loyal servants of our souls and wills. 
To help train ourselves in mastering our bodies is one 
reason why we abstain from meat on Fridays. Can 
you think of any other reasons? 

Our bodies are the canoes that carry our souls along 
the river of life. Some skill is required to manage 
canoes, lest they upset us. But, if you know how and 
if you keep them in shipshape, they respond like a 
thing of life to every stroke of the blade. One of the 
first rules of campcraft is: Take tender care of your 
canoe! One of the first rules of mancraft and soul- 
craft is: Take care of your body! 

Every boy, every American boy especially, wants a 
healthy, robust, vigorous body and the power of endur¬ 
ance. No boy wants to be a mollycoddle, a weakling. 
His own ambition expects him to keep himself physic¬ 
ally fit. America expects it. God expects it. 

We have been given tasks to perform, life-works of 
service to God, to our country, and to our fellow-man. 
We are not angels who have no bodies, but human 
beings who have. If we smash our canoe, we may be 
able to save up for a new r one. But we have only one 
body. If we treat it like a mudscow T and break it, all 
the gold of rich America cannot buy us a new one. 
And unless we develop strong muscles and powers of 
endurance, we are apt to be gravely handicapped in 
our life-work for God and man. 

Men of action have usually had good physiques. 
There are exceptions, of course, as, for instance, the 
great St. Paul, who had a none too robust constitution. 
Yet, even at that, he must have been pretty wiry, for he 
went through cold and hunger, stoning , and imprison¬ 
ment, shipwrecks and robber-haunted journeys in 
carrying the gospel to many lands. 


YOUR HEALTH 


121 


Theodore Roosevelt, in his early boyhood, was a 
dreamer and a physical weakling. One day he woke 
up and determined to be a man who would do things. 
The great obstacle that blocked his way was his frail 
health. He made up his mind to jump over the 



(g) Courtesy of Charles Scribner’s Sons 


ROOSEVELT WITH HIS BIG BULL RHINO 

Roosevelt built up his health and his muscles in order to be in better shape 
to do big things for his fellow Americans 

obstacle, and build up a robust body. So he started 
in at once with boxing lessons. He did not want bodily 
strength in order to beat college records. He wanted it 
in order to have the nerve-power and muscle-power for 
carrying out big plans for service. 


122 


PLAY FAIR 


Of Our Lord, St. Matthew tells us that in his early 
years He “grew, and waxed strong,” that after His 
twelfth year when He went up to the temple with St. 
Joseph and His Mother He “advanced in wisdom and 
age, and grace with God and man.” We know little 
of these years of his youth, and we know less of his 
physical appearance, but we can reason that He must 
have had a strong body and wiry constitution to have 
stood the great test of a full forty days’ fast in the 
desert in His thirtieth year. Most of us, even the 
most brawny and well-knit, would be in bed or go to 
pieces before the end of such a long strain. 

At any rate, He who expects us to be not talkers but 
doers, expects us to keep our bodies as hard and vigor¬ 
ous as we know how. Without stalwart bodies we are 
handicapped. Besides, when the body is not in good 
shape, the soul suffers. Many a man has gotten a 
reputation for being a crank, a longface, and a killjoy,— 
and has richly deserved it,—when the reason back of 
it all was that he was not taking enough sleep at night 
or was treating his stomach as if it were a goat’s. 

Just a word on smoking and drinking. Doctors, 
athletic trainers, and physical directors agree that when 
a boy is growing he needs every ounce of energy and 
cannot afford to burn it up in smoke. In Abyssinia, 
the natives have a most efficient method for capturing 
wild monkeys. They put alcoholic drink near where 
the monkeys hang out. The monkey takes it, and 
takes more of it, until his ideas get mixed up and he 
cannot tell the wily natives from his own fellow- 
monkeys. He is “one of the boys.” When Mr. 
Monk wakes up, he finds himself boxed up in a cage, 
his liberty gone, and in a few days en route to a zoo. 
“And that is the end of the monk” as it is also the end 



YOUR HEALTH 


123 


of a good many of his more intelligent human brethren 
who buy tickets and berths on the Alcohol Express. 

A sound mind in a sound body, and a sound and 
unselfish will and soul directing and driving both— 
that is the American ideal, and the Catholic ideal. 
Can you think of any better one? 

By the way, are you brushing your teeth twice a day, 
and getting nine hours’ sleep every night? 




■S 

CHAPTER XV 
The Other Fellow’s Health 

A somber looking gentleman, a stranger in the 
village, stopped a small boy on the street, and asked him 
solemnly: “Son, do you want to be an angel?” “Not 
yet!” bawled the alarmed youngster, “Murder! Help! 
Police!” 

A friend of mine asked his grown son some time ago: 
“Would you like to be buried or cremated?” “If it’s 
all the same to you,” he replied, “I should prefer 
neither, at least not yet!” 

Would you rather be killed by bludgeons or by 
germs? By an auto or by a microbe? Most of us 
prefer neither—at any rate, not yet! We prefer to 
keep on living. Life and health are among our dearest 
possessions. To save our life, w r e will readily sacrifice 
money, pleasure, time, opportunity, everything, except 
honor, loyalty, and conscience. The right to life is 
moreover our most sacred right, a right given us by the 
eternal Master of life and death, a right which human 
conscience, custom, and law T respect and protect. 

All peoples, even savage and uncivilized tribes, 
condemn and punish the cold-blooded unprovoked 
taking of a human life under most circumstances. 
Some, however, of the most civilized non-Cliristian 
peoples permit and have permitted many things as 
lawful which we, as taught by Our Lord, brand as 
murder. 

Nine millions of the ten and a half millions of the 
Philippine Islanders are Catholics living under civilized 
laws. But among the million who are still pagans and 

124 


THE OTHER FELLOW’S HEALTH 


125 


who live in the wilder parts are some tribes that prac¬ 
tise or have until recently practised the strange custom 
of headhunting. Ghastly human heads or skulls are 
taken for religious ceremonies and preserved, hung up 
within the houses or over the doorway as trophies. 
Headhunting expeditions are formed to secure the 
heads. Among some of the hillmen of northern Luzon, 
headhunting was practised as a field sport! One village 
would challenge another. A day would be set. Each 
village would send its picked team. Hooters from each 
village would be on hand. The rules of the game were 
strictly observed. The team taking the greater num¬ 
ber of heads won the event. A man who ‘pulled a bone * 
and lost his head, disgraced himself, his family, and his 
village! Happily, the Spanish Catholic missionaries 
and the American government officials have almost 
entirely put an end to such practices. Many of these 
same people are now taking part, as a result of Ameri¬ 
can encouragement, in track meets just like those we 
have in the United States. Hundred-yard dashes 
recently have taken the place of hunting heads. And 
of course those of the great nine million Christianized 
Filipinos whose ancestors when Magellan first came to 
the Philippines were headhunters have long, long since 
given up the custom under the influence of Christian 
teaching, and are as gentle in their ways as are the 
folks of an American village. 

The ancient pagans of Home and Greece, the people 
to whom Christianity was preached by the Apostles, 
had many just and splendid laws protecting the sacred¬ 
ness of human life. But they also showed much dis¬ 
regard for human life in many ways. Suicide to escape 
disgrace or grave disease was openly commended and 
recommended. Leading men and prominent and re- 


126 


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spected citizens, like Plato and Aristotle and Seneca, 
defended the murder, by drowning or strangling or 
exposure, of helpless newborn infants who were sickly 
or crippled. The Emperor Augustus crucified a slave 
merely for killing a pet quail. When in the year 61 
A. D. a high government official was murdered, and 
suspicion fell on one of his slaves, four hundred of 
them were put to death to avenge the act. 

In public shows, given by such emperors as Augustus 
and Trajan, two of the most progressive and enlightened 
rulers in Roman history, ten thousand gladiators fought 
a life-and-death struggle to amuse the vast crowds on 
the bleachers. The beginning of the end of the bloody 
gladiatorial fights occurred in the year of Our Lord 
404, when the Christian monk, Telemachus, rushed 
fearlessly into the arena to stop the cruel slaughter. 
He was stoned to death by the mob for his heroic stand, 
but his martyrdom led in time to the stopping for good 
of the butchery of brave men. Under the influence, too, 
of Christian teachers and energetic Christian leaders, 
suicide almost disappeared, and the rights of the help¬ 
less infant and defenceless slave were gallantly cham¬ 
pioned. A new sense of the sacredness of even the 
lowliest human life was ushered into the world. 

“Are not two sparrows sbld for a penny, and not one 
of them shall fall to the ground without your Father. 
The very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear 
not therefore: better are you than many sparrows.” 
God alone is the master of life and death. He gives or 
rather loans me my life as a sacred trust. No man may 
shorten or cut the thread of my life, except as a last 
resort of self-defence, should I unjustly attack him. 
Nor may I shorten or cut the thread of my own life. 

Some poisons like strychnine act quickly. Others, 


THE OTHER FELLOW’S HEALTH 


127 


like alcohol taken in too large quantity, act more 
slowly. “Who fills his cup three times,” ran an old 
pagan saying, “is a drunkard.” The man of average 
constitution who takes six or seven drinks a day may 
never get drunk. Yet modern science, like the old 
proverb, tells us he is apt to be in the alcoholic class. 
He is running an excellent chance of taking a ride inside 
a hearse in his forties, as a result of pneumonia, or liver 
or kidney trouble, whereas he would otherwise expect 
to be useful to himself and his fellowmen for twenty or 
thirty years more. He may thus be shortening his 
life by about twenty years. That’s a polite way of 
saying that he is committing slow suicide. 

There are said to be more ways than one of killing a 
cat. And there are other ways of killing a man besides 
blowing his brains out or putting poison in his coffee. 
Cain slew Abel with a bludgeon perhaps or a stone¬ 
headed spear, and then had the brazenness to say to 
God: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The reckless auto 
driver who speeds down a crowded street, the house¬ 
holder who permits fly-breeding nuisances on his 
premises, the landlord who rents dirty damp foul 
unsanitary hovels to the poor, the factory owner who 
does not protect his workers from dangerous machinery, 
dusts and poisons, or whose workshop is a fire-trap, the 
clothing seller who puts on the market wearing apparel 
made in sweatshops often reeking with contagious 
disease germs, the milkman who distributes milk in¬ 
fected with typhoid bacteria, the railroad company that 
neglects to do away with dangerous grade-crossings, the 
community—that means you and me, not the “govern¬ 
ment” or the other fellow—that gives its people impure 
water, or permits the selling of spoiled meats, or fails 
to dispose of its garbage properly, or closes its eyes to 



128 


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the fact that hundreds of its little children are carried 
away by the hand of death when that hand could have 
been averted,—all these folks do a job that is not per¬ 
haps as messy as the one Cain did, but who shall say 
that they are less thoroughgoing in their work than was 
the first murderer? 



(5) Underwood and Underwood 

SAFETY FIRST IN THE CANNING INDUSTRY 

Laboratory testing by experts employed by National Canners Association 
to ensure purity of products for common benefit of industry and of public 

Which do you prefer? Being killed before your time 
with a bludgeon—or with germs? 

Herod slaughtered the innocents with soldiers’ 
swords.^ In the United States we let about one hundred 
thousand infants die each year whose death could be 
prevented. “Suffer the little children to come unto 










THE OTHER FELLOW’S HEALTH 120 

Me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” We are^ 
sending them to Him in a way He did not mean. We 
are sending them by the route Herod picked out. 
Germs or the sword, what is the difference? 

Are we our brothers’ keepers? 

Our Lord’s kindness to the sick and the diseased, the 
great number of cures he worked of all diseases from 
leprosy to palsy, the dead whom he raised to life again, 
are testimony of his high regard for the sacredness of 
life and health. “He went about doing good.” 

The Catholic Church has always been intensely 
active in caring for and preventing sickness. Its 
hospitals, its nursing orders, its scientists, have been 
engaged in a centuries-long struggle with disease and 
death. Who could ever count the millions of lives she 
has thus saved? Like Our Lord, she not only preaches. 
She acts. And we Catholics, both as citizens and as 
Catholics, are called on to do all in our power to safe¬ 
guard the public health, to save life, to prevent disease, 
suffering, and death. Think of it! A hundred thou¬ 
sand infants’ lives sacrificed each year! A hundred 
thousand white coffins put end to end would stretch 
over fifty miles! The procession of one hundred 
thousand white hearses would take two whole days 
and two whole nights to pass a given point. 

When the draft came during the late war, it was found 
that nearly one-third of the flower of our manhood was 
physically unfit for service in the field. In the majority 
of cases, their unfitness was due to disease that could 
have been prevented in childhood. It is calculated 
that there are more than half a million deaths each year 
in this country that are preventable. 

Our accident rate is startling. About twenty-five 
thousand fatal accidents in the industries alone occur 


130 


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each year among our workers, and the number of non- 
fatal industrial accidents serious enough to disable the 
worker for four weeks or more is estimated at about 
700,000 annually. Of these probably one-third or 
more could be prevented by greater care and by muz¬ 
zling dangerous machinery. At an exhibition in one of 
our cities there was a miniature guillotine, the knife- 
blade of which dropped once every ten seconds, to 
indicate that an industrial accident occurs that often 
through the year in the United States. 

You see that we have a whole lot of hard work to do 
to live up to the high sacredness of human life which 
Our Lord taught. The development of machinery and 
of big crowded cities, of which we spoke in a previous 
chapter, has made acute this tremendous problem of 
public and industrial health. Safety First work is part 
of the program of meeting the new situation. Science 
searches for new ways of fighting these perils, and 
good citizenship and religion work hand in hand with 
science. 

It seems a little odd at first to think of our religion 
being interested in such things as the disposal of gar¬ 
bage, the filtration of the city water supply, the estab¬ 
lishment of quarantines for contagious diseases, the 
purifying of the milk supply, the inspection of meat and 
other foodstuffs, the passing of pure food laws, the 
destruction of flies and mosquitoes, medical inspection 
and care of school children, vaccination against typhoid 
and smallpox, traffic regulations on crowded streets, 
protection against fire and fire accidents, making 
machinery proof against maiming and mangling, in¬ 
stalling safety devices on trains, and a score of other 
things our forefathers of a century ago hardy dreamed 
of. Do you not think that religion, to be practical and 


THE OTHER FELLOW’S HEALTH 


131 



2.7 ilS?/ 


Photograph from Underwood and Underwood 

GO—STOP 

In the sizzling heat of summer and in the icy blizzards of 
winter, the traffic cop is always at his post of duty to protect 
human life and to prevent accidents. What other services 
does the policeman do for you and for me? 



132 


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to face squarely our modern life, must take a keen in¬ 
terest and active part in such life-saving work?. 

All these things, we the American people are doing on 
a vast scale. Thousands of men from the high public 
health official, down through the ranks of health and 
factory inspectors and firefighters and traffic cops,-—and 
we need not leave out even the ash collectors—are en¬ 
gaged in this great task of saving human life, of guard¬ 
ing the sacredness of human life, of staying the hands 
of modern Cains and of parrying the sword thrusts of 
the soldiers of modern Herods. 

Swat the fly and show no mercy to the mosquito. 
Clean up your own back yard, if it needs cleaning, and 
get the other boys in the neighborhood to get busy too 
on theirs. If you have to sneeze, sneeze in your 
handkerchief; do not scatter the frisky germs among 
the bystanders as a hunter scatters shot among a flock 
of ducks. Do your part in your school Red Cross work. 
Never lose a chance to blacken the reputation of the 
public towel and the public drinking cup, if you see or 
hear of such an animal at large in your vicinity. Lots 
of boys’ gangs have done some excellent work in dis¬ 
tributing anti-tuberculosis and other health pamphlets. 
Get in touch with your local health officers and offer 
your services. 

A good American, and a good Catholic does his part 
in conserving the greatest of our human resources, the 
lives of our children and of our workers. Human life 
is far more sacred than human wealth, is one of his 
first principles. There is plenty of work for everybody 
to do. Take off your coat and pitch in! Don’t wait 
until you reach voting age. Do it now! Else you 
won’t do it then! 


CHAPTER XVI 

Home 

Our Lord loved the great outdoors. Out into the 
wilderness He went to endure His forty days’ fast, up 
into the hills to pray and plan. His friendly intimate 
talks to us are filled with the references to ravens and 
doves and eagles, to sheep and wolves and foxes, to the 
green grass and the lilies of the field, to fig-trees and 
thorns and thistles and bending reeds, to farms and 
vineyards and whitening wheat-fields, to winds and 
floods and lowering skies. 

His love of outdoor things and familiarity with them 
went back, no doubt, to His boyhood days at Nazareth. 
A few minutes’ walk would take Him from the heart of 
the little village out into the hedge-lined country paths, 
into the fields and the woods. And many a time He 
must have climbed with the other boys of the village 
the rocky trail that led up the mountain side on which 
Nazareth was perched, and watched from the wind¬ 
swept and sun-bathed summit the eagles soaring on 
tense wings in the blue sky above Him. So as “He 
advanced in wisdom and age, and grace with God and 
man” He learned to read the great book of nature His 
Father had written. 

Stretching away at His feet to the south for miles and 
miles was the broad plain of Esdraelon, a pivotal spot 
in human history, where centuries before the armies of 
Assyria and Egypt, of Asia and Africa, had clashed for 
the mastery of the ancient world, where centuries later 
Asia and Europe, Turk and Christian knight and 
crusader, crossed swords for the mastery of the modern 

133 


134 


PLAY FAIR 


world. Must the sight not have made Him often think 
of His own daring, gigantic world-wide plan of bringing 
together the lands of the East and West, of Asia and 
Africa and Europe and the then undreamed-of con¬ 
tinents beyond the sea, into one great home, and their 
peoples of all colors and races into one great human 
family, the family of God, the brotherhood of man. 

Before racing down the hill with the other boys, He 
would, we are sure, have given an affectionate look at 
one among the many square flat-roofed white houses 
down in the village, the home of the village carpenter, 
the home of Mary and Joseph, the humble shelter of 
His boyhood and early manhood vears. 

W e are told little of His life at home during His teens, 
except that He was obedient to Mary and Joseph, He 
who was the eternal Master of the universe. At their 
knees He had probably learned to read and write, and 
perhaps went to the school attached to the synagogue. 
He worked at the side of St. Joseph from whom He 
learned how to use, as a skilled craftsman, the carpen¬ 
ter’s saw and plane. He no doubt made more yokes 
and plows than houses, for homes in Nazareth were not 
built of wood. When St. Joseph died, to Our Lord, 
then perhaps in His late teens or early twenties, fell the 
burden of supporting His mother. This is about as 
much as we can piece together about Our Lord’s boy¬ 
hood. But we know of course that His home was a 
home of peace, purity, reverence, happiness, good turns, 
and fair play. 

An old legend says that where He lived and moved 
and slept a cloud of light shone round about Him. 
But, it was a light no human eye could see, the light of 
divine loyalty and obedience and kindness and help¬ 
fulness and cheerfulness and purity and reverence. 


HOME 


135 


Such a light shines in and around your home, if you let 
it shine or make it shine. All depends on you. 

Come with me to another kind of home. Perhaps 
you know of one yourself, where disloyalty, selfishness, 
disobedience, grumbling and groucliiness, discourtesy, 
and irreverence are the daily program. In such a home 
I heard of recently there hung a sign: “There Is No 



i'rom an old engraving. Courtesy of Library of Congress 


AMERICAN PIONEERS DEFENDING HOME AGAINST ATTACK 

BY INDIANS 

The home we would die for ought to be worth living for 


Place Like Our Home.” Under these words, somebody 
had scrawled the following lines: “Leastwise Not This 
Side of The Infernal Regions.” 

Are you doing all you can to make your own home 
the happiest home in the world, and a home where 
your friends like to come? After all, a boy spends 
from one-half to two-thirds of his daily twenty-four 















136 


PLAY FAIR 


hours under the roof of his own home. He has only 
one home and what it is going to be depends largely on 
what he does to make it so. He has a responsible 
position to play on the “All-of-us-at-home Team,” and 
if the team is going to make good, he must play his part. 

Good turns, lending a hand, going shares, generosity, 
teamwork, friendliness, obedience, trustworthiness and 
honor, fair play and the square deal—no gang, no club, 
no team is worth its salt or will make good unless the 
boys in it stand up for these things, as every boy knows. 
But every fellow knows too that these are the things 
that make home worth wdiile. And every fellow know s 
that good turns, lending a hand, going shares, generos¬ 
ity, teamwork, friendliness, obedience, trustworthiness 
and honor, fair play and the square deal begin— 
Where? 

Could we put it this way? 

Whereas we the members of this club have onlv 
one home each and wdiat it is going to be de¬ 
pends on us; be it 

Resolved that w r e stand for the policy that good 
turns like good times and everything else worth 
while begin at home; and be it further 
Resolved that wo hereby appoint ourselves a com¬ 
mittee to make our own homes the best and 
happiest w T e can make them—or bust! 

All in favor of this motion, please signify their 
approval by saying ‘Aye . 5 


CHAPTER XVII 

Family Life 

One evening we made camp on a rocky pine-clad 
island at a late hour. By the time we had cooked 
supper, the darkness of night had settled upon the 
scene. We were eating by candle-light, when suddenly 
something flapped into my cup of cocoa splashing the 
contents in all directions. On fishing out the uninvited 
visitor, we found him to be a big Luna moth, somewhat 
the worse for his adventure, but still showing his great 
five-inch stretch of emerald-green swallow-tailed wings 
with their fairy down a bit dampened and their curious 
eye-like markings bedecked with cocoa. Did you ever, 
by the way, see a Luna moth? 

In my room, as I write, I have about fifty Luna moth 
eggs laid a week ago by the mother on my window 
screen. After coming out from her cocoon, she had 
mated, laid her eggs, lived her brief life as a winged 
night-flier, and died. Like the rest of her kind, she 
will never see her offspring. In a few days the minia¬ 
ture eggs will hatch, and out of them will come fifty 
small green caterpillars, each armed with bristly hairs 
that will discourage hungry birds, a*nd supplied with a 
head and teeth or mandibles out of all proportion in 
size to the small wriggling body. The newly-hatched 
little brutes will be quite able to take care of them¬ 
selves. All I would need to do would be to put them 
on a walnut or hickory tree and they would eat and 
eat and eat until they grew to their full size, three 
inches long. Then they would weave their thin papery 
cocoons and go into winter quarters. The fat pudgy 

137 


138 


PLAY FAIR 


caterpillar just crawls and eats. When he emerges in 
the spring he is clothed in his glorious green-winged 
wedding garment, the sign of his coming mating and 
parenthood. And having mated, dies, without even a 
sight or thought of his offspring. 

Far other from the ways of moths has God ordained 
the ways of man. For the human child is far differently 



INDIAN CHILDREN OF THE HUDSON BAY DIVIDE 

The human infant is helpless, and needs years of care by his parents. 
The husky boy on the left above ought to make a great football 
center when he grows up. The other one might do for a cheer leader 


placed at his birth,—not armed and equipped for life, 
but helpless and dependent on his parent’s care. He 
cannot walk or talk, although his voice and lungs are 
usually all that can be desired by him and more than is 
desired by the rest of the family! He cannot feed or 
wash or dress or care for himself. Left to shift for 
himself, as the newly-hatched caterpillar is left, he 


FAMILY LIFE 


139 


would shortly die. Unless given loving and intelligent 
care by his parents for years and years, he will grow up, 
if he grows up at all, with a body weakened and diseased 
and a soul scarred by ignorance and evil habits. During 
these long years the father must stay by the side of the 
mother, supporting, defending, protecting her in her 
labor of motherly love. 

This is why God said of old to our first parents: “A 
man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to 
his wife.” And Our Lord adds: “What God hath 
joined together, let no man put asunder.” No sunder¬ 
ing, no divorce, that deprives the child of his right of 
both a father’s and a mother’s love and care, and de¬ 
prives the mother of a husband’s love and protection. 
“I take thee,” runs the sacred marriage pledge, “to 
have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for 
worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, 
until death do us part.” 

Were children not born, the race would within a 
hundred years die, great proud nations would perish 
utterly, our rich grain-fields and our wealthy cities 
would become deserts and wildernesses, and amid the 
tumbling ruins of our massive temples and towering 
skyscrapers, the deer would browse and the wolf would 
hunt. And were children not tenderly and unselfishly 
cared for by their parents through all their early years, 
the race would wither and civilization would rot. To 
fathers and mothers has God entrusted the most sacred 
responsibilities, the very life and welfare of the race. 

Fathers and mothers take part in the sacred and 
divine task of bringing immortal souls into the world. 
And they take God’s own place of trust and responsibil¬ 
ity in the sacred and holy task of raising up through 
years of sacrifice and unselfish love worthwhile citizens 


140 


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of this world and loyal children of Our Father in heaven. 
Their task is hardly less sacred than the priest’s. 

The child-begetting powers and the home-making 
impulses which God has given to us are the source of 



AN ORPHANED FAWN 

Found in the woods by an Indian and his daughter. Had they not 
taken the dead mother doe’s place, the fawn would have soon died 
of hunger or fallen prey to timber wolves 


many of the most sacred things in life; home, father¬ 
hood, motherhood, love, brotherly affection, chivalry. 
No wonder Our Lord went so far as to sanctify child¬ 
bearing and home-making by raising matrimony to the 
lofty plane of a sacrament. 



FAMILY LIFE 


141 


Among the ancient pagan Romans of Our Lord’s 
day, the rule of might held sway in the home. Sickly 
and crippled infants were strangled or suffocated or 
drowned at birth, or else abandoned in the streets where 
slave-dealers gathered them in and sold them or the 
professional beggar grabbed them up and chopped off 



Photo by Jacob Neltyllng. 

Courtesy of U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey 


TWO YOUNG MOUNTAIN LIONS OF HIGH SCHOOL AGE 

Half grown but beginning to shift for themselves. They have needed a 
parent’s care for many weeks and will need a parent's coaching for some 

weeks to come 


their hands and maimed them to excite the passerby’s 
pity. In theory, the father had the right by law to put 
to death even an older child, although of course this 
right was exercised more rarely. The husband could 
by a mere letter divorce his wife, and drive from his 
home without appeal the defenceless mother of his 


142 


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children. Unchastity stalked abroad, unashamed, and 
winked at by even the best pagan people. 

If to-day chastity and purity on the part of man and 
woman, of boy and girl are in honor, if to-day the rights 
of the defenceless child and mother are chivalrously 
defended by public opinion and written law, we may 
thank our Divine Leader who had the courage to stand 
up and to die, that purity and the rights of the defence¬ 
less should prevail. 

We in America have many good laws protecting 
home, family and motherhood. Here follows just one 
sample: Many of our states have what are called 
mothers’ pension laws. The husband may be dead or 
an invalid. This would oblige the mother to go out to 
work during the day or night, and leave her young 
children neglected. The mothers’ pension law grants 
her a certain amount of money from the public treasury 
each month to enable her to stay home and care for her 
children, and to keep the home together. 

But on the other hand we have some home conditions 
that cry to heaven for remedy. To eke out a scanty 
living, where so many fathers are grossly underpaid, 
mothers and little children are sent out into the mills 
and factories and canneries to work long hours, often 
from before sunrise to after sunset, and often too, 
where unfair and inhuman laws permit, even at night. 
In the slums of our cities whole families are forced by 
undeserved poverty, to live in dirty, unhealthy, dark, 
windowless, unventilated flats and rooms, and con¬ 
ditions not unlike these often prevail in mining and 
mill towns far removed from the congested cities. The 
poisonous snake of divorce has crept silently into 
thousands of peaceful homes, and with its venom has 
killed the happiness of mothers, more commonly than 


FAMILY LIFE 


143 


fathers, hut in all cases the happiness of the children 
and their chances for success. It is usually the child 
and the defenceless woman who suffer most from 
divorce. 

Better housing, more just wages, and fairer hours of 
labor for young and old, stricter laws of divorce would 
do much to safeguard the sanctity of the home and the 
rights of the mother and the child, but the remedy that 
lies deeper than all these is the remedy of chastity and 
purity. For it is chastity and purity that is the final 
upbuilder and protector of home and home-life, of 
robust manhood, gentle motherhood, and tender child¬ 
hood. In a few years from now, it will be up to the 
American Catholic boy of to-day to use his head, his 
hands, and his vote to save the home and the mothers 
and children of the land. But without waiting for so 
much water to flow under the bridges he can do a still 
bigger work and play a still bigger part here and now, 
and in a very simple way—by fighting for high ideals 
of purity, by reverencing, loving, and living purity in 
his own life. He owes it in fairness to his own home, 
to himself, to his country, and to God. 


CHAPTER XVIII 
Purity 

“And God created man to his own image: to the 
image of God lie created him: male and female he 
created them.” We are men and proud of it. But 
God, who treats us as men, not as babies, expects us to 
play the man’s part. God trusts us. He puts us on 
our honor in the field of purity as in other fields of our 
lives. Our sex nature and powers were given us as a 
sacred trust for the founding of homes and the protec¬ 
tion and upbringing of helpless and defenceless child¬ 
hood. Around these things cluster like stars many of 
the glories of life, above all, the hallowed name of 
mother. But purity, fallen and dragged in the slimy 
sewers of sin, turns into something more hideous than 
rotting leprosy. 

Here is a champion swimmer. Look at his broad 
massive shoulders, his deep chest, his muscles of iron. 
Every stroke of his mighty crawl drives him through 
the water with engine-like force. Trained to the very 
pink of condition, his sun-tanned, brawny, robust body 
is a sight that makes you glad to look upon. One day 
he ventures out in the river too near the falls, is sucked 
into its powerful draw, and is swept over the brink. 
A week later floats up to the surface from down in the 
depths a bloated Thing with glassy, mud-filmed eyes, 
reeking with the stench of decomposition. So changes 
purity sucked into the draw of sin. 

“Be a man, and chaste,” challenged the old pagan 
writer. And a modern poet has put a still more stirring 
144 



Painting by Watts. Courtesy of Library of Congress 

SIR GALAHAD 

The noblest of the knights of poetry 


145 



146 


PLAY FAIR 


challenge into the mouth of the noblest of the knights 
of poetry. Sir Galahad: 

My strong blade carves the casks of men: 

My stiff lance thrusteth sure. 

My strength is as the strength of ten, 

Because my heart is pure. 

In his early teens, many marked physical changes 
come over a boy. His shoulders broaden, his chest 
expands, his height increases, his voice deepens. The 
voyage from physical boyhood to physical manhood 
has begun in earnest. With the physical changes, come 
also equally important mental changes. Teamwork, 
loyalty, courage, service, ideals take on a new and more 
vivid meaning. Manhood is more than mere physical 
manhood. 

In the human body God has put many different kinds 
of glands which give off important fluids, or secretions, 
as they are called. The saliva from the salivary glands 
helps us digest our food. Tears from the tear glands 
moisten and cleanse the eyes. Haven’t you noticed 
that when you get something in your eye, the eye 
becomes filled with tears, although of course you are not 
crying. The tears are endeavoring to wash out the 
cinder or speck, which if it remained in the eye would 
cause pain, inflammation, and perhaps even loss of 
eyesight. 

The most important of these different secretions are 
the two chief secretions through which God gives us 
the gift of manhood and later, if we marry, the sacred 
trust of parenthood. One of these secretions is carried 
by the blood to muscles, bones, nerves, and brain. It 
is this wonderful internal secretion which brings about 
the deep changes of which we spoke above. It must 
be conserved, if vigorous and robust and high-minded 


PURITY 


147 


manhood is to be attained. The other secretion if 
discharged unconsciously during sleep, will cause 
absolutely no harm, no matter what crafty advertising 
quacks or smart Alecks or know-it-alls may say. If 
however discharged consciously and wilfully through 
experimenting with one’s self, God’s trust in us is 


4 



(g) Photograph by Frank Kecvcs 

THE FALL BACK 

Your body is an obstreperous colt. Any moddlycoddle can get himself 
thrown. It takes a man to tame a frisky bronco 

grievously dishonored, a mortal sin is committed, and 
such a habit gravely checks and blocks the robust 
growth of body and soul into manhood. 

Should temptation come, God is ever present at our 
side, not as a detective, but as our Father, friend, and 
kind helper. Call upon Him, and He will not go back 
on you. 


148 


PLAY FAIR 


A man was seen riding horseback furiously down the 
street, and struggling to rein in the horse and keep his 
feet in the stirrups. He did not seem to be much of a 
horseman. “Where are you going?” somebody shouted 
at him. “I don’t know,” he roared back. “Ask my 
horse!” Theodore Roosevelt, before he started busting 
dishonest trusts and crooked political rings, learned 
how to bust kicking and bucking broncos. No horse 
ever ran away with him. 

Your body is like a frisky spirited colt or bronco. 
Treat it kindly and fairly and it will carry you gallop¬ 
ing towards your goal in life. Give it a chance. But 
do not let it throw you or run away with you. Make 
good in the bronco-busting game. Either you must 
break the bronco, or the bronco will break you. Any 
mollycoddle can get himself thrown over a horse’s head. 
It takes a man to break in a worthwhile colt. “Be a 
man, and chaste!” 

“Blessed are the clean of heart,” said Our Leader. 
Purity begins in the soul and mind. “Make clean the 
inside of the cup and of the dish, that the outside may 
become clean.” Our Lord would not stand for men of 
the whited sepulchre type, who are outwardly spotless 
and respectable and well-dressed, but within are full of 
all filthiness. 

Unchaste thoughts and images will come at times, 
invited or without an invitation. Three things will 
help keep them out or shoo them away. First, keep 
busy,—with hobbies, collections, pets, sports, athletics, 
live games, books with lots of action in them, anything. 
It will be time to mope and daydream when you are 
ninety years old. Keep on your toes. Secondly, if 
wrong thoughts come, say a short prayer to Our Lord, 
His Blessed Mother, your Guardian Angel, then turn 


Fainting by Gerald Leake. Courtesy of U. S. Public Health Service 


WOMEN FIRST 

The “women first” code of honor is one of the finest traditions of the sea 



149 







150 


PLAY FAIR 


your attention to some of the things just mentioned and 
in which you are interested. Thirdly, stick to fre¬ 
quent confession and communion, weekly if possible. 
Be master of your thoughts and your tongue as well as 
of your body. Otherwise a boy becomes master of 
neither, and the cringing flunkey of both. 

Joan of Arc is one of the miracles of history. A 
peasant girl, raised in a little obscure village of France 
at eighteen she was leading to victory the rough soldiers 
of her country. Clad in her snow-white armor, mounted 
on a fiery horse and carrying her pennon, she cheered 
on her army of rude soldiers, stood shoulder to shoulder 
with them fearlessly in the thick of battle, and drove 
like cattle before her the beaten armies of England. 
Although a young attractive girl, camping for weeks in 
the midst of an army made up largely of adventurers, 
soldiers of fortune, ruffians and bandits, more than one 
of these hardy troopers testified that there was some¬ 
thing about Joan that forbade even the thought of 
aught but purity regarding her. 

There is always something about a pure and good 
girl that makes a man go on his knees in reverence and 
look up in admiration and respect,—a something which 
even the tough and the thug, which even the low- 
minded degenerate sees, recognizes, and bows before. 

Do you remember reading about the sinking of the 
Titanic? The great ocean greyhound on its maiden 
voyage to America ran at night into a giant iceberg. 
The vast hulk rapidly sank, carrying down hundreds of 
passengers. Most of the women were saved. The 
men gave them first chance to the lifeboats, and there 
were not enough by far for all the passengers. The 
“women first” code of honor is one of the finest tradi¬ 
tions of the sea, the code of honor that says a man must 


PURITY 


151 


give his life to save a woman’s, the code that brands 
justly as a low coward the man who looks out for his 
own safety and comfort regardless of the woman’s and 
child’s wherever danger threatens. It is the man’s 
part to protect the woman and the girl, to see in her 
the mother of mankind, the image of his own mother, 
the daughter of the Mother of Christ. 

Of a piece with the 4 woman first ’ tradition is the law 
of courtesy in the daily things of life, such as taking off 
our hats when saluting or talking to a girl or woman, 
giving a seat in a crowded car to a mother, stopping to 
let a girl enter a door first before you. And very much 
akin to these are what we call the conventions. Too 
much familiarity in ordinary things breeds contempt, 
we know. Too much familiarity between the boy and 
girl, the man and woman, breed other things as well. 
Spooning and pawing are a slippery game. The con¬ 
ventions of sex that demand the rule of ‘hands off’ are 
not arbitrary despotic rulings of unthinking prudes. 
They are the outer trenches which society has carefully 
dug and barb-wired to protect the inner soul of the home 
and of purity. 

Some girls are perfectly able to protect themselves. 
I heard of one some time ago who wa*s at a party. One 
of the boys present made a remark to her that bordered 
on the indecent. Without a moment’s hesitation she 
struck out straight from the shoulder. It was no 
love-tap either that landed on the boy’s cheek, for 
she was a girl of athletic build and prowess who knew 
how to use her biceps and fists. Do you think she did 
the right thing? 

Not all girls have the courage, the decision, and the 
muscle of this one. Some are of weak and more pliant 
character. Don’t you think that in this case, it is a 


152 


PLAY FAIR 


part of honor for the boy to protect her against her own 
weakness? All the more so, if she is herself inclined to 
be a little too forward and fresh and inviting of liberties. 

If your own sister were insulted in your presence, or 
if some other boy dared to take liberties with her, 
would you let him get away with it, or would you 
protect her if necessary to the point of sending him 
away with a black eye? Every girl you meet is some¬ 
body’s sister, somebody’s daughter. Is it not simple 
fair play to treat every girl as you demand that your 
own sister be treated? The girl of to-day is the mother 
of tomorrow. Is she not sacred in view of her future 
motherhood? And every girl and every woman is the 
loved daughter of the Mother of Our Saviour. 

Our Saviour showed His reverence for motherhood 
and womanhood by the honor He showed His own 
mother. Not only did He choose her from among all 
the daughters of earth, but throughout her life. He 
preserved her in perfect sinlessness and spotless and 
dazzling white purity. Even before her birth, from 
the first moment of her conception, He kept her un¬ 
blemished from the stain of original sin itself through 
her Immaculate Conception. And when death knocked 
at the door of her heart, He let not even her body go 
into the corruption of the tomb, but in her Assumption 
her blessed body that had borne the Saviour of mankind 
was taken swiftly on angel wings to the throne of God 
and reunited to the purest soul our humanity can 
boast of. 

Sacred Mother to all the daughters and sons of man, 
she is our Mother too, given to 11s by Our Lord dying 
upon the cross. “Son, behold thy mother.” In his 
fight for freedom from the slavery of impurity, in his 
fight for the captaincy of his own soul, in his fight for 


PURITY 


153 


his lofty ideal of purity and chastity, a Catholic boy 
does not fight alone. She, his Mother in heaven, is on 
his side and at his side. When temptation unsheaths 
its claws and bares its fangs, his life-and-death fight 
is already half-won when the whispered prayer to her 
leaps from his heart: ‘‘Mother most pure, Mother most 
chaste, pray for us.” 


CHAPTER XIX 
Play 

A crowd of Catholic boys were on a playground. At 
a lull in the game, one of them said laughing: “What 
would you fellows do, if you got word now that you 
were going to die within the next hour?” Several 
said: “We would make double-quick time to confes¬ 
sion.” One said: “I'd keep on playing and finish the 
game.” He was not bluffing or swaggering or talking 
big. He meant it. His soul was healthy, and he 
believed that God wants us to keep our bodies healthy 
too 

That, at least, was the story as I heard it. Whether 
the story is legend or history, I cannot say and do not 
care. The point is: Was the boy right? 

After all, has not healthy play a real place in God’s 
scheme of things? Did not God set aside one day out 
of every seven that even grown-up folks should play as 
well as pray? “The Sabbath was made for man, not 
man for the Sabbath.” And after we have looked 
after our duties of home, school, and church, don’t you 
think God wants us to get into the game and is glad 
when He sees us enjoying good clean healthy sport? 
Don’t you think that when we play hard we are doing 
God’s will just as truly as when we work hard,—pro¬ 
vided of course we do both? 

The fact is, it is hard sometimes to tell what is play 
and what is work. A tough day’s canoeing is work for 
an Indian. It is play for us. You remember Tom 
Sawyer’s whitewashing chore. He would rather have 
spent the day at the ‘ole swimmin’ hole.’ One of the 

154 


PLAY 


155 


gang happened along while Tom was busy splashing 
the whitewash on the fence. Tom finally allowed the 
other boy to wield the brush for a while in exchange for 
an apple core. As each of the gang happened along 
Tom extended the privilege for valuables offered. At 
the end of the day Tom had a kite, a tin soldier, a dog- 
collar, twelve marbles, six fire crackers, and a lot of 
other things and meanwhile had escaped the chore. 

Roosevelt played hard and worked hard. But 
whether he boxed or wrestled or rowed or broke bron¬ 
chos or hunted lions and rhinos in Africa or walked ten 
miles in drenching rain or cleaned up the New York 
police department or led his Rough Riders up San 
Juan Hill or dealt smashing blows at crooked trusts 
or fought to preserve our forests from selfish interests, 
or put through the Panama Canal, he always had “a 
bully time,” as he put it. He had the great knack of 
making play out of work. 

One of the best things about play is that when we are 
doing it we are not only having 4 a bully time 5 but we are 
• also getting a whole lot out of it. Somebody has said: 
44 Success in life is doing what you like to do and getting 
paid for it.” That is not such a lofty view of life, 
but there is something in it. In clean healthy sport, 
we have the time of our lives, and get paid for it, not 
in cold cash as a prize-fighter or big league home-run 
artist is paid, but in a lot of things that money cannot 
buy and that can buy money and buy other things 
worth infiriitely more than money. 

A crowd of us Americans were once playing baseball 
on the old Campus Martius at Rome in Italy. There 
was a runner on third. He was about ten feet from 
the base, when the catcher slammed the ball at terrific 
speed to the third baseman. The runner slid back, 


156 


PLAY FAIR 


but the ball hit him with full force on the back of the 
head and nearly laid him out. The onlookers who did 
not know the rules of the game went wild with excite¬ 
ment at what they thought the wonderful marksman¬ 
ship of the catcher. 

To play a game, you have to know the rules. Each 
game has different rules, but some rules are common to 
all games. Here are four of them. 

Rule 1 . Play. Don't just sit on the bleachers or 
shout from the side lines. Get in the game yourself. 
When it comes to making a noise, nearly any one-year 
old infant can win out against a grown-up boy. It 
takes muscle and practice and skill to play. 

Play full of action is better than ‘sitting-still’ play. 
The movie fiend and the movie star divide up. The 
movie star gets the action, and the movie fiend gets 
the sitting still. Reading books is fine play, but read¬ 
ing the most exciting of all books, the book of nature, 
on a day’s hike is finer. Indoor play on a rainy day 
is better than no play at all. But the best equipped 
gym in the world cannot hold a candle to a good play¬ 
ground or an open athletic field. Two hours of out¬ 
door play are worth five hours of indoor play. 

It is the vigorous active outdoor game that goes 
farthest to build up what every healthy boy wants, 
muscular strength, endurance, and nerve-force. Swim¬ 
ming, baseball, basketball, volley ball, hikes, camping, 
track work,—these and such things are the gifts of God, 
and I think He must smile with joy when we use them. 
For, if we want to do in a worthwhile way the lifework 
He wants us to do, we are apt to be badly handicapped 
unless our muscles and nerves are in tiptop order. 
And besides the great chance may come any day, when 
we will need strength, endurance, skill, and nerve to 


PLAY 


157 


protect the defenceless woman or child, to rescue a 
drowning person, or to stop a runaway. 

Rule 2. Keep your temper . You remember probably 
hearing of the sign hung up at the dance in the early 
western mining*camp: ‘Don’t shoot the fiddler! He’s 
doing his best!” Don’t kill the ump. He’s usually 
doing his best. Even the Pope is infallible only in 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 

FEEDING TIME ON THE HIKE 
Two hours of outdoor play are worth five hours of indoor play 


matters of faith and morals. The umpire’s decision 
may have been a raw one. And then again it is just 
possible that he was right and we wrong. Babies sulk. 
A good sport dies hard, but if he has to lose he loses 
with a smile instead of a grouch. A college football 
eleven gives a hearty yell for the team that has just 
rolled up the winning score against them. That’s 
the American idea of sportsmanship. 

Rule 3. Playfair. “Cheating,” says Curtis, one of 



158 


PLAY FAIR 


the men who have done most to get playgrounds and 
athletic fields and swimming pools for American boys, 
“is the device of a weakling who 'cannot deliver the 
goods.’” From your experience, wouldn’t you agree 
with him? Would you trust your money in the hands 
of a man who deliberately cuts a base, or who swears to 
the umpire until he is black in the face that he touched 
the runner off base, when he knows perfectly well that 
he did not? Over the entrance to the athletic field of 
one of our American colleges is the inscription: “Fair 
play and may the best man win.” Good sport on the 
American plan means good sportsmanship. And good 
sportsmanship means fair play and the square deal, 
and stands for the rule of the game: Let the best man 
win! 

Rule 4. Play to win. To win fairly, of course. The 
game is never over until it is finished. At a college base¬ 
ball game I saw a year or so ago, a game that helped to 
decide the championship of the south, the score stood 
6 to 1 against the home team in the seventh. The 
rooters had already decamped in such numbers that 
the vacant spaces on the stands were as gaping and 
sad-looking as bald spots on a mangy dog. Then came 
a great rally after two men were already out. The 
twirler for the visiting team, who had held the home 
swatters to one lone run for the first seven innings, was 
suddenly treated to a merciless hammering and driven 
out of the box. By the time the slaughter had ended, 
the score stood 9 to 6 in favor of the home team. That 
team did not intend to ride in a hearse until it was 
dead. 

“The old guard dies. It never surrenders.” Play 
hard. Never give up. Take the lead and keep it. 
But if you do happen to get behind, as the best athlete 


PLAY 


159 


or the best team may sometimes do, keep fighting. 
And even if you get hopelessly behind, play out to the 
finish and die game. 

Every boy who knows the outdoors knows the four 
points of the compass. The rules above are the four 
points of the sporting compass. Play. Keep your 
temper. Play fair. Play to win. 

And by the way, after you learn an exciting new game 
or hear a first-rate story do you ever think of sharing 
the good things with other boys you know or with the 
youngsters at home? Here’s a chance for a lending-a- 
hand. Here’s a chance of doing what is or what comes 
very near being a real modern work of mercy, in counsel 
and instruction. 

The fact is, the great majority of American boys 
know very few games, many boys only two or three. 
But as every club boy knows, there are scores of games 
full of action and excitement. A recent survey of the 
capital city of Illinois showed that even such common 
games as prisoners’ base, leap frog, hare and hound, 
and duck on a rock were played by less than one-half 
of one per cent of the grammar school boys. 

Of course, one of the great drawbacks to play for city 
boys is the lack of vacant lots, open fields, and play¬ 
grounds. Recently I had to go by trolley clear across 
the whole western half of one of the big cities on the 
Atlantic seaboard. Throughout the whole distance of 
t perhaps four miles, we passed through solidly built-up 
blocks of houses and stores. There were one or two 
small parks, but not a single vacant lot or playground. 
Where on earth did the boys of that city play? Did 
they play at all, or were they just raised on books and 
bricks and breakfast food? 

Modern machinery, as we saw from an earlier chap- 


160 


PLAY FAIR 


ter, has largely been responsible for the crowding into 
great cities. And the crowding into great cities is 
responsible for the disappearance of play space. The 
boy and girl have suffered, as a result. But in other 
ways, grown-ups have suffered too. Much of the 



(g) Photograph by W. C. Persons 

THE DAY’S WORK 


After ten or twelve hours at this kind of work, especially on a hot summer 
day, wouldn’t you feel ready for a little rest and play? Compare the indoor 

fumes with the campfire smoke 


modern unskilled machine work is extremely monoto¬ 
nous. Here, for instance, is a man who for eight hours 
a day stands at a machine that hammers one bolt in an 
automobile. Here is a woman or girl who from early 
morning to supper time does nothing but sew but¬ 
tons on clothes at the rate of 90 an hour or punch 



PLAY 


161 


eyelets in shoe uppers at the rate of 2,000 a day. 

Then too the hours are often so long that there is no 
time for recreation. According to a recent report, 
52% of the workers in the steel industry work the 12- 
hour day, and about one-half of these work every day 
in the week, including Sunday. Allowing time for 
sleeping, eating, dressing, washing, house chores, travel 
to and from the mill out of the remaining twelve hours 
a day, what time is left for leisure, rest, and play? 

A recent study of textile workers in an eastern city 
showed numbers of young mothers working on night 
shifts. Their husbands are able-bodied and hard¬ 
working, but cannot earn enough to support the family 
in the underpaid industry. So the young mothers 
have to go into the mills, choosing night work, so they 
may be with their children during the day. This 
means, among other things, that they must do from 
eighteen to twenty hours of work a day. 

God set aside one day of the week as consecrated to 
religion, but also and equally as a day of complete rest 
or recreation. Against hard-driving employers and in 
favor of hard-driven working men and women, the 
Catholic Church has always striven, in order that every 
man and woman should have one day in seven for re¬ 
laxation and play. Moreover, the holydays of obliga¬ 
tion, which were formerly several times more numer¬ 
ous than they are today, were likewise days of rest 
and play, for the workers. The Catholic conscience 
today backs up the movement for shorter working 
hours, for the eight-hour day, for the prohibition of 
child labor and of night work for women, and for ade¬ 
quate play space for boys and girls in our crowded cities. 

Many Catholic parishes and schools have play¬ 
grounds attached to them. One such playground I 


162 


PLAiT FAIR 


know of was established several years ago by a parish 
in an eastern city. In the two years following its 
establishment, it did such good work that only one 
case from among the parochial school children came 
before the juvenile court. 

The American people are awakening more and more 
to the need of playgrounds and parks, athletic fields 
and bathing beaches, gymnasiums and recreation 
centers. Street playing is dangerous, as any city boy 
knows, whether he has been lucky or unlucky so far. 
Bumping into an auto truck or a flivver usually hurts 
the truck or flivver less than it hurts the boy. In some 
cities, certain streets or blocks are roped off during the 
morning hours in summer or the after-school hours in 
winter, so that the boys and girls can play safely in 
the streets. The plan is a good one, but other play 
places are needed. 

Many cities are rapidly increasing their number of 
playgrounds, laid out for baseball or tennis or basket¬ 
ball or football and equipped with swings and gym 
apparatus. All schools built to-day in an awake city 
have playgrounds attached, or, if land be too dear, a 
gymnasium or indoor play space, and many of the 
larger new schools are putting in swimming pools. 

Libraries, art galleries, museums, zoos, public gar¬ 
dens, parks, are other public provisions for the recrea¬ 
tion of the people. Many cities are building up splendid 
large athletic fields, some of them having a dozen 
baseball diamonds and football fields and a score or 
more of tennis and basketball courts, with golf links 
and in one city a field for polo. Other cities have 
bought up large tracts of land in the suburbs where 
families and clubs can go for outings and picnics, and 
spend a day “out in the fields with God.” 


PLAY 


163 


Many states have set aside hunting and camping 
areas for the pleasure of those who care for outdoor life 
over night. The most wonderful parks in the world 
are those which the Federal government has established 
as national playgrounds. In these paradises of marvel¬ 
ous natural beauty are majestic forests and icy lakes 



Photo by Scenic America Co. Courtesy of National Park Service 


GUNSIGHT PASS TRAIL, GLACIER NATIONAL PARK 

The wondrous beauty of our national parks reflects God’s power and His 
smile. Fine coasting, by the way, all the year round. Puzzle: Find the 

pack train in the distance 


and glacier-clad mountains and thundering waterfalls 
and rainbow-colored canons that are the wonder of 
travelers and the pride of our land. It would seem that 
God Himself had set them aside for playgrounds and 
given them to His children to play in and be happy. 
Their wondrous beauty reflects not only His power but 
also His love, and His smile. 



CHAPTER XX 
Your Life-Work 

Have you ever seen a troup of acrobats do the pyra¬ 
mid act? Or have you and your gang ever tried the 
pyramid-building act yourselves? What happens to 
boy number one, or two, or three on top, if number ten 
on the ground row suddenly sprawls? 

As I write, reports tell us that millions of people are 
starving in the vast Volga and Kama river basins of 
southeastern Russia. The farmers have been produc¬ 
ing less and on top of this has come a killing drought. 
The crops have failed and the people cannot be fed. 
Not by bread alone doth man live, but without bread, 
without daily food, he dies. Were all the farmers 
and ranchmen of this country to go on a strike or leave 
their farms and ranches, we would face famine, as the 
Russian peasants are facing it today. 

Were all the coal mines of the country to close down 
for good, we would spend many cold days and nights in 
our houses during the winter, and the factories and 
mills of the country would close and throw millions of 
men out of work. 

Even if the mines and the farms and the ranches were 
turning out raw material for our food and fuel in abun¬ 
dance, we should be little or no better off, if the railroads 
and auto-truck companies, the canals and ship lines 
suspended operation. We who use and need the food 
and fuel are often a thousand miles or more from the 
point of production, and that is a long way to walk 
with a bag of flour, a quarter of beef, and a sack of coal 
on your back! 


164 


YOUR LIFE-WORK 


165 


I suppose we could make clothes out of old paper and 
shoes out of rags if we had to. I have never tried it. 
But most of us find it necessary to use for our clothes 
fabrics that have passed through a long process from, 
say, the sheep’s back to our back, and for our shoes 
leather that is treated and worked up through elaborate 
stages from an animal’s hide to a finished human foot 
covering. We should have a sorry time of it, were our 
textile mills and shoe factories to close down forever. 

A man several years ago went, stripped and without 
anything but his hands, his brains, and a healthy body, 
into the Maine woods. With his knowledge of wood¬ 
craft, he managed to survive and live, just as Robinson 
Crusoe did. It was a great adventure, but of course 
under modern conditions, not one man in a hundred, 
to say nothing of women, children, the aged, and sick, 
could have turned the trick. Moreover even at that 
our ‘wild man’ of the Maine woods would have had 
poor chances of getting through had he broken his leg 
or been taken down with fever. He would have needed 
the doctor. And if he had broken the state game laws, 
when hunting for his dinner, he would probably have 
needed the services of the lawyer. 

A short time ago the great aerial liner, the super- 
Zeppelin Roma, crashed down from the skies at Langley 
Field near Norfolk, carrying its human freight to death. 
The engines, the framew r ork and stays and braces, the 
radio apparatus, everything in this infinitely complex 
monarch of the air seems to have worked beautifully,-— 
everything except some one thing. Apparently there 
was a structural weakness at just one point in the 
giant’s hull,—a cable controlling the elevating rudders 
gave way and snapped. Disaster followed. A chain 
is as strong as its weakest link. 


166 


PLAY FAIR 


Our pioneer settlers in America were able to shift for 
themselves, as individuals or families or small adventur¬ 
ous groups of explorers. That time has passed forever. 
To-day you and I depend for food, and shelter, and 
clothing, and medical care, and fifty other necessities 
and comforts of life on the farmer, the miner, the . 

r " 



(g) Underwood and Underwood 


A HARVESTER IN ACTION 

Were all the farmers to go on a strike, how could we get our three squares 
daily? The farmers work for the welfare of their fellowmen by providing 

food for them 


railroad worker, the physician, and nearly everybody 
else. If one part of the big machine of modern life 
breaks down, the whole big machine crashes like the 
Roma. 

Looked at from another angle, this means that every 
man who is doing honest work is doing something for 



YOUR LIFE-WORK 


167 


the welfare of his fellowman, And the man who is 
doing no honest work is at best a shirker and a ‘sponge,’ 
for he gets all he can from the rest of us, and gives 
nothing. The farmer, the stock-raiser and the lumber¬ 
man, the miner, the mechanic and the manufacturer, 
the stenographer and the bookkeeper, the trainman 



Courtesy of U. S. Forest Service 


LUMBERING IN THE MINNESOTA FORESTS 

The hewers of wood no less than the engineer and the doctor do their share 
towards helping the rest of us to live in decent comfort. In what ways 
should we suffer if the wood supply failed? 


and the sailor, the lawyer, the doctor and the profes¬ 
sional engineer, the social worker, the teacher, the 
nurse, the man or woman who serves in the uniform 
of the church or the state,—everybody in the land from 
the college dean to the stone breaker, from the president 
of the republic to the ‘ hewer of wood and the drawer of 























168 


PLAY FAIR 


water/ everybody who is doing his life-work honestly 
and intelligently is doing a part towards the well-being 
and happiness of his fellowmen, and is in so far follow¬ 
ing out the Christian ideal of love of neighbor. Love 
means first of all service and good deeds. 

In nearly all vocations moreover there are chances 
for and traditions of good turns. The engineer may 
save thousands of lives by his work of purifying a big 
city’s water supply. The dairyman who scrupulously 
sells only the purest milk will contribute to the health 
and life of hundreds of infants. The lawmaker and 
statesman who works for the good of his people may 
influence for the better the lives of whole states and 
nations. 

Some of the professions have very definite traditions 
of service. It is a matter of honor among physicians 
to give the best medical care without pay to those 
patients who cannot afford to pay. I have over and 
over again gone to doctors in the interests of some poor 
person who needed their services, and in every case 
they have willingly and gladly given their time and 
labor without thought of pay. It is a fixed pledge of 
the legal profession never to reject the cause of the 
defenceless and oppressed for money reasons, although, 
as we have seen in an earlier chapter, much of this work 
is being carried on now by legal aid societies. Other 
professions, such as that of the social worker, are 
devoted almost totally to the direct service of the 
needy, the unfortunate, the mentally and morally sick. 

Of course, whether or not this w T ork of service will 
be looked upon by God as such depends on whether 
or not the worker has the spirit of service in his heart. 

“The land of a certain rich man brought forth 
plenty of fruits. And he said: I will pull down my 


YOUR LIFE-WORK 


169 


barns and build greater. And I will say to my soul: 
Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years, 
take thy rest, eat, drink, make good cheer. And God 
said to him: Thou fool, this night do they require thy 
soul of thee.” 

Here was a well-to-do and prosperous farmer who 
had grown and harvested and stored enough grain to 
feed a household of perhaps twenty people for years. 
Such a progressive farmer in modern times would use 
labor-saving machinery and power-driven tractors that 
would enable him to raise enough wheat and corn to 
feed hundreds or thousands of people. He rendered 
service, but without the spirit of service. His spirit 
was the spirit of the dollar mark, of utter selfishness. 

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a 
needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of 
God.” Or, as we might put it today: “It is easier 
for a five-ton auto truck to pass through a keyhole, than 
for a man whose life-ambition is money-grabbing in¬ 
stead of service to love God and his neighbor.” “Blessed 
are the poor in spirit.” Of course, a man has to provide 
the necessities and the decent comforts of life for him¬ 
self and his family. But it is a far cry from this to 
money-grabbing. 

A Catholic man who had served with honor as an 
American officer in the late war, said to me recently: 
“I have just taken a position in social work and intend 
to devote the remainder of my life to it. The salary 
is a good deal less than I could earn elsewhere, but it is 
enough to enable me to give my wife and myself the 
necessities of life, and that is all we want. I wanted 
to take up something that would give me a chance to 
do some good to other people.” Would you call this 
the spirit of service? 


170 


PLAY FAIR 


I read not long ago of an engineer at work on a proj¬ 
ect of getting a supply of pure cool water from the 
mountains to a city in the west. A business firm 
tempted him with the offer of a salary four times as 
large as the one he was receiving. But he refused it in 
order to complete the project that would promote the 
health and welfare of thousands of his fellowmen in the 
city. 

Some men enter the scientific branches of the govern¬ 
ment merely as a stepping stone to big salaries with 
large business concerns. But in the same branches of 
the government there is an increasingly large number 
of men of the highest ability who give up honors and 
big pay to devote their talents and genius to the welfare 
of the people. 

Each year thousands and thousands of Catholic 
young men and women as they pass out of boyhood and 
girlhood give up chances of comforts and fat salaries to 
devote all that they have, body and soul, to the welfare 
of their fellows, to clothing the naked, and harboring 
the harborless, and tending the sick, and instructing 
the ignorant. They form the wonderful advance 
army of Christianity, the knights of God whose wdiole 
lives are given to the weak, the ignorant, the defence¬ 
less, the sick, the aged, the helpless, and given without 
thought of honor and without thought of any riches 
except those riches that rust and moths consume not. 
These are the silent heroes of our religious orders, our 
brotherhoods, and our sisterhoods. 

Still others enter the priesthood to labor for the 
welfare of others as Our Lord labored. God is inter¬ 
ested in our welfare here on earth. But our welfare 
in the land beyond the grave with its startling choice 
of eternal happiness or eternal loss is of infinitely 


YOUE LIFE-WORK 


171 


deeper interest in His sight. “What shall it profit 
a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of 
his soul?” The priest’s life-work is an unselfish labor 
of love for the welfare, in this life and the next, of his 
fellowman. 

As a preparation for his task, he has to go into train¬ 
ing as rigid as that of West Point or Annapolis for from 
six to twelve years. Then he must pass equally rigid 
tests regarding learning and character before he is 
ordained, that is, before he receives at the hands of a 
bishop the sacrament of Holy Orders, one of the seven 
sacraments. In the United States to-day there are 
nearly twenty-two thousand priests. 

Many boys of the teen age have already made up 
their minds what they intend to be. Some kinds of 
life-work give greater chances of service than do others. 
But all honest kinds give chances for service. Making 
good on the job however means the spirit of hard work 
as well as the spirit of service. 

Edison once said that genius is two per cent inspira¬ 
tion and ninety-eight per cent perspiration. Millions 
of people had seen apples fall from trees. Newton was 
the first to guess why they fall instead of flying up into 
the air. But Newton had sweated for years before he 
understood. 

Every year men apply at the United States Patent 
Office for patents on crazy schemes and machines for 
perpetual motion. They are usually cranks. But this 
can be said for them: they work. Henry Ford’s 
friends in his early days used to think he was a crank 
too. But Ford kept at his plans. He did not believe 
in perpetual motion. Nor did he believe in perpetual 
rest! 

The man who wants to be something himself and to 


172 


PLAY FAIR 


do something for others in life does what every good 
baseball player does. On the perpetual rest plan he 
will never stop a red-hot grounder or knock out a home 
run. Before choosing a life-work or vocation, he 
studies carefully his abilities, his limits, and his chances. 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


FIRST OVER 

On the perpetual rest plan, they would never scale the wall 


He does not fan at the first ball that conies his way. 
Like the big league swatter, he looks ’em over. And 
when the right one comes, he swings at it with all that 
is in him. 

A boy in his teens stands at the cross-roads on life’s 
hike. Consult your map. Get out your compass. 






YOUR LIFE-WORK 


173 


On the perpetual rest plan, dusk would find you snoring 
at the cross-roads. Choose your path and go down it 
like an auto racer. There are no speed laws or traffic 
cops on this boulevard which leads to the right kind of 


CHAPTER XXI 
Education 

On the banks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, a 
canal that empties into the Potomac at Washington, I 
have twice seen an old colored fisherman stretched out 
at full length on the grass and apparently asleep. He 
had thrown his line into the canal with the hope of 
hooking and landing a catfish. The line was attached 
to a short four-foot pole. The pole was stuck upright 
in the ground. And on the tip end of the pole was a 
small bell! 

The idea was a good one, but I have never seen him 
catch any catfish. A hundred years ago, before the 
rivers and lakes near our present large cities were fished 
out, the idea might have worked pretty well. But 
that time is gone, probably forever. 

A hundred years ago, when opportunity jumped at 
bait a good deal more eagerly than it does now in 
America, making good in life-work was an easier job 
perhaps. But not to-day. If you want to make good, 
you have to know how to ‘deliver the goods/ and you 
learn first of all through education. 

A boy leaving school at the end of the eighth grade 
often has to take a ‘blind alley’ job, like delivering 
bundles or tending soda fountains. A few dollars 
each week may look like a whole lot of money at first, 
but there is no future, no chance of promotion ahead. 
A high school education, and a college course, not only 
open the way to rapid promotion that will double or 
multiply the amount on the weekly pay check, but also 
gives training that enables us as we grow in years to 
174 


EDUCATION 


175 



grow in usefulness and service to our fellowman. 
Pasteur saved thousands of lives, as we saw earlier in 
this book, but he sweated many a year in schooling and 
preparation. The Western engineer mentioned in the 
last chapter had had to plug through college work, 
else he would never have had charge of the great good 
turn to which he unselfishly devoted himself. 


CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL, EVANSVILLE, IND. 

One of the newer among the 1,552 Catholic high schools in the United States 

The American people believe in education, as a safe¬ 
guard of our land and our liberties and our welfare. 
And they believe in it in a practical way. At the pres¬ 
ent time, they are spending about four times as much 
of their money on it each year as they spent in 1900, 
and about twelve times as much as they spent fifty 
years ago. They are pledged to the principle of an 
education up to the age of fourteen at least for every 


Photo by The Mason Studios. Courtesy of Rvansvllle Catholic High Sehool 










176 


PLAY FAIR 


boy and girl in the land. And, in addition, practically 
every state or community offers the chance of a high 
school or college education to every boy or girl who 
chooses to take it. 

Many boys have to leave school at the end of the 
eighth grade, because they are obliged to help support 
their homes. For these most communities now have 
part-time or night schools, where, for instance, the boy 
who has had to take a job in an auto repair shop can 
go and learn to become a skilled auto mechanic, or 
where an office boy can take up typewriting and 
stenography. Even for those living in the country or 
in small villages, there are splendid opportunities to 
get coaching through extension and correspondence 
courses provided by private or public schools and 
universities and state departments. 

Many of the states too provide what is called voca¬ 
tional education in the skilled trades, in scientific 
farming and dairying, in business practice, and home¬ 
making. Such an education helps to save the boy 
from having to enter such ‘blind alley 5 occupations as 
running an elevator or becoming an unskilled workman, 
and goes far to assure him of a competent income to 
support himself and his future family throughout life. 
When we recall that in our prosperous United States 
about fifty per cent of the unskilled male workers are 
receiving less than a living wage, and consequently 
are unable to provide the reasonable decencies of life, 
let alone the comforts and luxuries, for themselves and 
their wives and children, it is easy to see what the 
possession of a business training or of a skilled trade 
like carpentry or machine work, means. Learning and 
earning go hand in hand. 

The Catholic Church has always been keenly inter- 


EDUCATION 


177 


ested in education, and has been the mother of schools 
and universities. As early as 1300 A.D., there were, it 
is estimated, about 37,000 Benedictine monasteries, 
and schools were conducted by all or nearly all of them. 

In the City of Florence in the year 1336 there were 



(g) Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation 


THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, WASHINGTON, D. C. 

Airplane view of several of the thirty buildings of the University and affili¬ 
ated colleges. Old athletic field in upper right. Gym, indoor swimming 
pool, and new stadium just outside picture on right. There are 16 Catholic 
universities and 114 Catholic colleges in the United States 


about ten or eleven thousand pupils in the schools out 
of a total city population of only ninety thousand 
people. 

Vocational training in the skilled trades was given 
with brilliant success in her monasteries and in the 


178 


FLAY FAIR 


deeply religious craft guilds, corresponding somewhat 
to our modern labor unions. 

The university idea is the product of the Church 
chiefly, and she either founded or took a large share in 
founding most of the greatest European universities, 
such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Padua, Paris, 
Salamanca, Vienna, Prague, Heidelberg, Strasburg, 
Leipzig and some scores of others. 

They did not need a truant officer for the thousands 
of students at the Lhiiversity of Bologna. In fact, if 
the professor came late or cut a class, the students 
reported him to the authorities, and if the professor 
could not give a good excuse, his salary was docked! 

The first university founded in the New World, that 
of St. Mark’s at Lima, Peru, was put under the direc¬ 
tion of the Dominican fathers. It was started in 1551, 
nearly a century before the establishment of Harvard, 
a century and a half before the opening of Yale, and 
two centuries before the founding of Columbia and the 
University of Pennsylvania. 

The Catholic Church in the Lmited States has in the 
last three generations built up one of the most wonder¬ 
ful educational systems the world has ever seen, at the 
same time that its members have contributed their 
money to the building and maintenance of the public 
school system. There are to-day nearly fifty-five 
thousand teachers and nearly two million young people 
in our American Catholic schools. L’lie Church has 
maintained its own system, because she believes and 
the Catholics of the country believe that the whole boy 
should be educated,—not only his hands and mind, but 
his character and soul. They believe that the school 
should help prepare the pupil to be a worthwhile citizen 
not only of this world but as well of the world to come, 


EDUCATION 


170 


that all education is built upon religion as its founda¬ 
tion, and that religion is a weekday as well as a Sunday 
matter. 

Here again as so often before in this little book we 
come face to face with the religious orders. For it is 
they, the noble men and heroic women, who have given 
their lives to the work with no thought of reward or 
salary—it is they who have made the great Catholic 
educational work of our country a possibility and a 
success. Of course, it goes without saying that their 
labor of love has in turn been made possible by another 
labor of love, by the sacrifices and generosity of your 
own father and mother and of the Catholic fathers and 
mothers of the land. To these has the Church appealed 
to support its schools and to send their children to 
Catholic schools, and her appeal has met with a loyal 
and generous response from the millions of Catholic 
parents. “The greatest religious fact in the United 
States today is the Catholic School System, maintained 
without any aid, except from the people who love it.” 

Within a few years a large part of this responsibility 
will fall upon the shoulders of the Catholic boy of 
to-day. But even without waiting so long, the Cath¬ 
olic boy in the Catholic school to-day can do his part 
in this big work by making good in his class. The 
success and honor of a school are in the hands of the 
teacher and parent, but no less are they in the keeping 
of the boy himself. 

A word on a means of Catholic education not spoken 
of much, namely the Catholic newspaper. To-day the 
Catholics of the country have one of most efficient 
news bureaus in the world, the Press Bureau of the 
National Catholic Welfare Council. It has representa¬ 
tives in the important cities of Europe and South 


180 


PLAY FAIR 


America and it supplies our American Catholic papers 
with the latest and most important and interesting 
news from the whole world. 

Recently the Holy Name Society of Chicago adopted 
a slogan that ran in part as follows: Every Catholic 
Child in a Catholic School, and A Catholic Paper in 
Every Catholic Home. Do you get a Catholic paper 
in your home? If not yet, why not ask the folks at 
home what they .can do for you? As a Catholic you 
are taking part in the biggest work in the world done 
by the biggest organization in the world. A Catholic 
paper helps you to keep up-to-date and to know what’s 
what. 


CHAPTER XXII 
Liberty 

A story is told of a stranger who had just come to 
America. As he walked down the street, he flung his 
arms to right and left of him, until he finally struck an 
American in the nose. At this, the American squared 
off and knocked him down. “Where do you think you 
are?” said the American, as the man picked himself up. 
“In America,” he replied, “I thought this was the land 
of liberty.” “It is,” said the American, “but your 
liberty ends where my nose begins!” 

God, Our Father, plays no favorites. He treats us 
all alike in a democratic fashion. Even though he 
gives greater talents and ability to some people than 
to others. He will demand a stricter reckoning from the 
former than from those less richly endowed. To every 
man born into the world, He gives certain same liberties 
and rights which no man may justly take away from 
us. First, He gives us all our free wills. A tyrant may 
rob us of our liberty; a burglar may rob us of our cash; 
a thug may rob us of our life; but no human being can 
rob us of our free will. And God is not an Indian giver. 
He respects the freedom He has given us. He trusts us. 

Secondly, He gives us certain liberties or rights over 
and beyond freedom of will. “We hold these truths 
to be self-evident,” runs the famous passage of the 
Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created 
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with 
certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, 

. Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

America holds sacred the rights of free speech, of 

181 


i82 


PLAY FAIR 


religious liberty, of freedom from search, of protection 
of life and property, of protection from false imprison¬ 
ment, of protection for imprisonment for debt, of 
voting and holding office. No man, for instance, may 
be put into prison and so deprived of his liberty, with¬ 
out a fair trial, and a chance to defend himself. No 



^ Photo by Major Hamilton Maxwell- Prom Underwood and Underwood 


THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LIBERTY 


This symbol is the first thing that greets the newcomer to our shores 


man may be reduced to slavery or thrown into jail, 
as could in other times and countries be done, because 
he is unable to pay his debts. 

America was the great pioneer who first blazed the 
trail of political and religious liberty in the modern 
world. That is one reason why we are so proud of 






LIBERTY 


183 


being Americans. When she took the big chance and 
dared, many folks in other parts of the world and a 
great number even of our own colonists shook their 
heads and said to her: “You can’t do it. It won’t 
work!” just as many folks had said to Columbus when 
he dared to sail the unknown ocean: “You can’t do it. 
When you get to the edge of the flat world, you’ll 
topple off into space.” He didn’t topple off, did he? 

Of course, political and religious liberty was not 
brought about over night or merely by passing laws of 
equality and tolerance, nor has it been maintained 
without a struggle. But we got the start on the right 
trail and during the last century particularly we have 
made more and more progress. There is a whole lot 
still to be done, in such fields as the ousting of crooked 
and grafting and bribe-taking political rings, the getting 
of equal justice for rich and poor in the courts and law¬ 
making halls, the obtaining of fair wages and healthy 
working and living conditions for workers. Liberty, 
equality, justice, even in the best of lands, can be and 
is often denied large sections of the people. It does not 
help matters to cuss the ‘government.’ We are the 
government. We have to wake up and know what’s 
going on. Each citizen has to turn himself into a 
detective bureau to get the facts. “A people has as 
good a government as it deserves.” 

“A very small number of very rich men have been 
able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little 
better than slavery itself.” Do these words of Pope 
Leo XIII apply to America, or were they meant only 
for Europe? Is even a country that has political and 
religious liberty healthy, if large numbers of its under¬ 
paid working people, its workers, are scarcely better 
off than slaves? 


184 


PLAY FAIR 


Back of all our modern liberties, lies the teaching of 
Christ that God loves each of His human children 
equally, that in God’s sight every man has equal rights 
and dignity. It is to Christianity above all that we 
owe the spirit of liberty and fair play, of friendliness 
and good teamwork. 

Some of the martyrs were thrown to the wild beasts, 
others were beheaded, others flung into caldrons of 
burning oil, others covered with pitch and set afire to 
make living torches. Why? In the cause of liberty 
as well as in the cause of Christ. The old Roman 
State demanded that they should throw incense on the 
braziers of burning coals before the idols of the state 
gods, although these gods were often only living or 
dead emperors. But, as one of the early Christians, 
Tertullian, put it: “It is a fundamental human right, 
a privilege of nature, that every man should worship 
according to his convictions.” This sounds like a 
sentence from a Fourth of July oration, doesn't it? It 
sounds very familiar in our ears, but it was an unheard 
of principle in the Roman State before the time of 
Christ. When the Catholic Lord Baltimore in 1634, 
founded the colony of Maryland and unfurled for the 
first time in our land, a century and half before the 
Constitution, the banner of religious liberty, he was 
only playing true to the spirit of Christianity, the spirit 
of the martyrs, and the spirit of Christ. 

“Your liberty ends where my nose begins.” All 
liberty has and must have its limits, otherwise the other 
fellow’s liberty will slash holes in my rights. In other 
words, in order to have liberty, we must have laws. 
Liberty is not license. License is liberty’s deadly 
enemy. 

Were it not for the law of gravitation, a baseball 


LIBERTY 


185 


thrown up into the air would just keep on going up and 
up and up like a toy balloon, and if you started to 
spring up for a high liner you would keep on going up 
and up till you reached perhaps—the moon! Without 
the law of gravitation, there would be no baseball 



From Painting by Emanuel Leutce 


FOUNDING OF THE COLONY OF MARYLAND 

Here for the first time in our land was unfurled the banner of religious 

liberty by the Catholic Lord Baltimore. 


games. If the earth should suddenly get shunted off 
its orbit around the sun, before long we should all be 
burned up with the heat or frozen to death from cold, 
depending on which direction the earth took. All 
nature is governed by law. 

Without certain laws in our own homes, we should 






186 


PLAY FAIR 


also have to suffer many inconveniences, and should 
have many a time to go to bed without supper because 
there was no one responsible for seeing that supper was 
made ready. You cannot run a winning football team 
without a captain or someone in charge. Still less 
could you run a home. 

In the community, living without laws would be an 
impossibility. In the days of the western pioneers, 
very little time passed before the decent men gathered 
together in a mining town, for instance, found that 
thugs and toughs and crooks were overrunning .the 
town, and incidentally bullying and waylaying the 
peaceful inhabitants. The peaceful element therefore 
would get together and form themselves into a com¬ 
mittee of safety for the common good. In a large 
modern city, laws are naturally still more necessary. 

The moral law, as defined in the ten commandments, 
was given us by God out of His love for us. Sometimes 
it is a little hard to obey the ten commandments. But 
each one of the commandments protects some human 
liberty or right. The fourth, sixth and ninth protect 
the home, the fifth protects our freedom and life and 
health, the seventh and tenth protect our possessions, 
the eighth protects our good name. 

You may recall from your early years the familiar 
prince in the fairy tale. The old king says to the 
visiting prince: “If you kill that dragon up in the cave 
on the hillside, you can marry the princess, my daugh¬ 
ter/’ Some folks seem to think of God’s law as just 
such a meaningless task, imposed upon us without 
rhyme or reason and merely as a test for getting to 
heaven. It is a test, but a test arising out of His desire 
for our welfare in this life as well as in the next. 

God is like a good coach who knows the game and 


LIBERTY 


187 


who wants the team to win. A coach makes certain 
rules. No smoking, for instance, and no alcohol; eight 
hours’ sleep; two hours’ practice a day, and so on. 
These are an athletic coach’s commandments. And if 
the coach knows his business and has the interest and 
success of his team at heart, he enforces them and 
insists on them. But he makes no foolish or unneces¬ 
sary rules. He is thinking only of the welfare of the 
team and of the members of the team. 

God wants us to win. He knows what helps us to 
win here, and what helps us to be happy here and here¬ 
after. His laws are not given out merely to give us 
something a little hard sometimes to obey. They are 
given to protect our rights, our welfare, and our 
liberties. If, for instance, there were no law of God 
against stealing and killing, would your overcoat and 
your sweater, your life and your safety not be put in 
some danger from other people who would steal them 
or attack them? God makes His laws for us as easy 
as He can, and what laws He makes He makes out of 
His love for us—to protect us and our rights and 
liberty from unjust and hurtful infringement on the 
part of other people, and to protect other people from 
unjust infringement by us. God believes in fair play to 
everybody. And His laws are in a special manner a way 
of protecting the freedom and liberty and rights of the 
weak against the brute force of the bully and the strong. 

To protect liberty, we must have laws. And laws 
mean of course obedience. “If you love Me,” said 
Our Lord, “keep My commandments.” America too 
says to us: “If you love me, keep my laws. That’s 
the first test of patriotism and loyalty.” Your home 
also says: “If you love your parents who are the 
coaches of the home team, keep the rules of the team. 


188 


PLAY FAIR 


That’s the only way of keeping liberty and happiness 
in the home.” 

Our Lord in asking us to be obedient only asks us to 
do what He Himself did. “He went down to Nazareth 
and was obedient” to His Mother and foster-father. 
The greatest test of obedience ever passed was the test 
He passed on the night before He died. He was in 


Courtesy of U. 8. Bureau of Biological Surrey 


TRAPPED 


This northern bobcat would still be free and at liberty if he'had respected 
the freedom and liberty of others. Uncle Sam’s trappers showed him that 
American liberty does not mean license to do what he pleased regardless of 

the other fellow 



the Garden of Gethsemane. He foresaw all the pain 
and keen suffering He woidd undergo the next day on 
the cross. His sweat became as drops of blood trickling 
down upon the ground. But with the sublime courage 
of obedience there came the prayer to His lips: “My 
Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. 
Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.” 




LIBERTY 


189 


On one occasion some of His enemies who wanted to 
get Him into trouble by trickery came up to Him in an 
apparently friendly way. They asked Him what 
would look to us like a simple question: Is it lawful to 
pay taxes to the Roman government? But there was 
a catch in the question. If He had said: “Yes,” the 
Jewish people, who hated their Roman conquerors and 
masters, and hated paying taxes to them, might have 
turned against Christ. If He had said: “No,” His 
enemies would have accused Him of disloyalty to the 
Roman government and gotten Him into trouble with 
the powers that be. There seemed no way out for 
Christ. His enemies thought their scheme would put 
Him in a corner. 

Our Lord then asked them to show Him one of the 
coins used for the tax. It bore the emperor’s image, 
just as our nickel bears the image of an Indian. “Whose 
image is this?”' He asked them. “Caesar’s,” they 
answered. He replied: “Render therefore to Caesar 
the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that 
are God’s.” They saw they were outwitted in their 
wily scheme and they beat a hasty retreat. Our Lord 
in one sentence had made them look foolish. But far 
more than that, He had set the law of obedience and 
order regarding both state and religion, and had laid 
the foundation of our modern religious liberty. 




CHAPTER XXIII 

Courage 

Have you been confirmed yet? If so, you will re¬ 
member that when you went up into the sanctuary the 
bishop anointed your forehead with chrism, a mixture 
of consecrated olive oil and balm, in the form of a cross. 
In Italy after a baseball game, we used to rub our arms 
with olive oil to keep our muscles strong and limber, 
just as athletic trainers in this country have their men 
use liniment. 

After the anointing, the bishop gave you a slight 
blow on the cheek. Some boys think it is going to 
be a hard blow and almost dodge. The blow however 
does not hurt. It is only a slight blow. But it is 
a blow. It means that the boy has passed out of 
childhood, and should be ready, like a man, to stand 
blows bravely without whimpering or wincing in the 
cause of Christ. 

Bayard, the last of the great knights, was called the 
“Knight without fear and without reproach/' Single- 
handed, he defended, on one occasion, a bridgehead 
against a whole detachment of trained and husky 
soldiers. He, like his brother knights, had had to pass 
through a boyhood of preparation and of eager hope, 
until the great day came when the boy was given a 
sword, was charged to use it in defence of the right and 
to hurt no man unjustly, and was given the accolade or 
sword-stroke with the flat of the sword across the 
shoulder. If knighted with religious ceremony by the 
bishop, the bishop gave him a light stroke only and also 
a slight blow on the cheek. Sometimes however the 


190 


COURAGE 


191 


stroke was given on the field of battle, and was not so. 
light. When the Black Prince was knighted by his 
father on the battlefield of Crecy, his father delivered 
such a blow with the flat of the sword on the young 
prince’s neck that the boy was stunned. 

At a still earlier time, the barbarian ancestors of the 
knights—our own ancestors too—used to make their 
boys into full-grown warriors of the tribe by a similar 
but rougher ceremony. The boy would be taken out 
and given a blow that would strike him to the earth. 
“Be brave!” w^ere the only words of the ceremony. 
But the boy had looked forward for years to this day 
when he would become a full-fledged warrior, privileged 
to bear weapons and to fight at the side of the men of 
the tribe. If he shrank from the blow or showed any 
signs of fear when it descended, he was disgraced forever 
in the eyes of the men and women of the tribe. 

Nearly all of our American Indians had some rite or 
other through which the mettle and courage of the boy 
was put to a test before he was admitted to the com¬ 
panionship of the men of the tribe. The boy would be 
sent out into the w T oods to shift for himself amid cold 
and storm and hunger and thirst. He would have to 
undergo rigid and long fasting. Or his courage and 
hardihood was tried by shorter and more painful 
ordeals. He was flogged until the blood flowed, as 
among some of the Gulf coast tribes, or skewers were 
thrust into his flesh, thongs attached to both protruding 
ends of them, and then the skewers were pulled out by 
tugging and jerking at the thongs. The flesh was of 
course badly lacerated, and the pain was intense, but 
it was a test of courage and endurance, and most of 
these initiation ceremonies had a religious meaning as 
well. 


192 


PLAY FAIR 



EXPLORING THE BLACK CANYON 

A highly dangerous peace-time adventure undertaken in the 
cause of humanity. Can you find the explorer scrambling 

over the big rock? 

is branded as not worthy of the companionship of 
brave men. The quitter is looked down upon. 


Courage is not only admired in a man. It is ex¬ 
pected of a man by every people on earth. The coward 


Courtesy of U. S. Bureau of Reclamation 


COURAGE 


193 


When we think of courage, we are more apt to think 
of war and battles. We think of the defenders of 
Bunker Hill, with their scant supply of powder, waiting 
until they saw the whites of the advancing redcoats’ 
eyes, before pulling the triggers of their muskets. We 
think of John Paul Jones, who, in his great sea battle, 
with fortune turning against him apparently, when he 
was asked by the enemy, “Have you struck?” replied, 
“Struck! I have not begun to fight.” We think of 
Hobson’s attempt to bottle up the Spanish fleet in 
Santiago Harbor by sinking the Merrimac across the 
entrance channel at the imminent risk of his own and 
his seven companions’ lives. We think of the magnifi¬ 
cent charge of the marines at Belleau Wood. And so 
the familiar list could be continued for pages. 

But peace time too has its heroes, often unsung and 
unknown. Two workmen were repairing a lightning 
rod on a steeple. One of them had to stand on the 
shoulders of the other. Some of the molten lead carried 
by the man on top spilled and fell on the bare arm and 
hand of the other man. Had the latter moved at all, 
the upper man would have been thrown to the pavement 
far below. But not a motion was made, while the 
molten lead ate into his flesh. He endured the in¬ 
describable pain to save his companion worker. 

The Gunnison River of Colorado plunges for thirty 
miles through the dark depths of the Black Canon. 
The river bed is on the average about one-half mile 
below the brow of almost perpendicular walls of rock 
that in places are scarcely a hundred feet apart at the 
top. Death lurks at a hundred points in this seething, 
roaring torrent where it races madly down rapids and 
over spray-clad falls. 

In order to drive a tunnel for the Uncompahgre 


194 


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irrigation project of the Government, that opened up 
150,000 acres to cultivation and provided home-sites 
for 25,000 men, women and children, it became 
necessary to explore this gorge of death, which no 
white man had ever dared to enter before and from 
which no Indian had ever come out alive. Two cour¬ 
ageous American engineers of the United States Rec- 



THE ROOSEVELT DAM 

The Roosevelt irrigation project, even larger than the Uncompahgre, 
opened up 200,000 acres of desert land to cultivation, and provided homes 

for many thousands of families 


lamation Service, W. W. Torrence and A. L. Fellows, 
volunteered for the task. They went down the canon, 
not in boats for no boat could have stood the battering, 
but on a rubber air-mattress! At one point the river 
ahead fell, so far as they could see, clear out of sight, 
and they had to take a desperate plunge over ajnlls 
that turned out to be as high as a house. At another 




COURAGE 


195 


point, where the river ahead entered a pitch-black 
underground tunnel, they had to throw themselves 
head first into the swirling funnel-shaped vortex at the 
tunnel’s mouth, with no inkling of what perils might 
await them in the black waters. Would you not 
consider Torrence and Fellows heroes in the cause of 
humanity and its needs? 

Some years ago, the Overland Limited was wrecked 
in the bad lands of Wyoming at night during a terrific 
sleet storm. A hundred and fifty maimed or dead 
human beings were in the wreckage. The nearest city 
was forty-five miles away. No other train was due 
for five hours. There seemed no way of getting out 
word to send relief. And then, out of the twisted 
wreck was seen to crawl on profusely bleeding stumps 
a man whose legs had just been cut off at the knees in 
the accident. He was Frank Shaley, a telegraph line¬ 
man, the only man present who knew how to tap the 
wires. A rope was thrown across the arms of one of 
the telegraph poles, and he was gently lifted up. 
Though bleeding to death and in excruciating agony, he 
cut the wire and grounded it and sent his message. The 
relief train rushed to the scene and scores of lives were 
saved. But not Shaley’s. He gave his own life to save 
others. Before the train arrived, he had passed away. 

The incorruptible judge who refuses to let off an 
influential criminal, the lawmaker who stands out 
against a crooked political boss even at the penalty 
of losing his chances for re-election, the college man 
who fights for clean athletics against those who would 
introduce ringers, the boy who tells the truth regardless 
of consequences to himself—all these and a hundred 
other challenges of manhood call for the courage that 
is essential to the making of heroes. 


196 


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On one occasion Our Lord was preaching fearlessly to 
his fellow-townsmen of Nazareth and telling them 
truths they did not want to hear. In their rage, they 
rose in a body to lynch Him. The mob took Him to 
the brow of a steep hill nearby and were about to throw 
Him headlong down over the cliff. But He passed 
untouched through the midst, of them and went His 
way. What was there in His dauntless glance and 
fearless bearing that cowed this raging mob? 

And what was there about Him that made the 
money-changers and marketmen in the temple rush 
pell-mell out of His way, when single-handed He drove 
them before Him, because they had made a thieves’ 
den out of His Father's house? One man against scores 
of able-bodied men, yet they fled before Him like rabbits. 
Kindly and gentle though He always was, yet where 
there was wrong to be righted, He faced unpopularity, 
ill-will, death, rather than flinch a foot. He never 
hedged or trimmed. ‘He taught as one having 
authority.’ 

And this has been the spirit of His Church since the 
beginning. Rather than play false to her Founder, 
she parted with all her earthly possessions in France 
a few years ago, just as in the days of Henry VIII she 
parted with hundreds of thousands of her children 
rather than yield a principle. In the sixteenth century 
she might have gathered an enormous harvest of con¬ 
verts in Japan, had she been willing to give up her high 
ideal of purity. 

To-day, laws may say that a man may divorce his 
wife and marry another, but she stands like Gibraltar 
on the principle that what God has joined together no 
man may put asunder. The employer may say: I 
pay what others pay for labor. She firmly replies: 


COURAGE 


197 


Life is more than money; what others pay may be just 
or unjust; a man has a right to a living wage, and if 
you give him less, no matter what others are paying, 
you are stealing. She has the courage to stand for 
right and justice, regardless of consequences, just as 



TJ. S. Official 


ADVANCE UNDER FIRE 

A glimpse of the actual fighting by our American troops overseas. At the 
right, one man has already fallen. War must be the last resort in self- 
defence, but if your country’s defence needs you, would you have the 

courage to volunteer? 


her martyrs in all ages have stood for right and justice 
and truth and principle even unto death. 

Her life has not been a quiet canoe trip on placid 
waters. She has spent it weathering the storms of the 
ocean. Her life has not been one of quiet peace. It 
has been a year-in and year-out struggle. She has 
always stood in the thick of the fight, taking hard 


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blows, and giving harder ones in the defence of the 
weak and in loyalty to truth and justice. 

How about yourself, in the matter of courage? 
Here is a test of ten questions. The answer will be the 
measurement of your own physical and moral courage. 

Have you the nerve: 

To get under a cold shower or take a cold bath on a frosty 
morning? 

To own up to your guilt, when you are pretty sure of getting 
punished for your misdeed? 

To jump into the water to save a drowning child, although you 
may be a poor swimmer yourself? 

To get down on your knees for your night prayers at a camp, if 
the other fellows don’t? 

To endure without whimpering what Indian boys endure before 
they are admitted to equality with the men of the tribe? 

To stand up for your religion when you hear it unfairly attacked? 

To protect your sister or any other girl, if a larger and older boy 
who can probably lick you insults her? 

To admit publicly that you were wrong, if you have made an 
accusation or charge against another fellow and later find you 
were mistaken? 

To let the umpire know when you are sure you did not touch the 
runner although the umpire thought you had, and although 
the rest of your team should cuss you for admitting you hadn’t? 

To volunteer to defend your country, if and when she needs you? 

Check up your answer to each of the ten tests, count¬ 
ing ten points for each. Now, what is your score? 
Do you score up to the standard in physical courage? 
In moral courage? Or, in both? 


CHAPTER XXIV 
Our Father 

It 5 s not polite, runs an old saying, to talk about ropes 
if you are the guest of a man whose father has been 
hanged. More than one hundred and thirty years have 
rolled by since Benedict Arnold laid his traitorous plot 
to deliver the fortress of West Point into the hands of 
the enemy during the War of the Revolution. He 
escaped hanging, it is true, but would any American 
to-day want to be known as one of the descendants of 
the traitor? A disgrace of this kind may cling as a 
blot and stain upon a family for hundreds of years. 

You may perhaps have heard of the famous “Kalli- 
kak” family. A young man of good family nearly one 
hundred and fifty years ago had a son whose mother 
was feeble-minded. Feeble-mindedness is one of the 
greatest sources of crime, drunkenness, and immorality 
to-day. This son married and his descendants have 
numbered 480. Of these 480, a great many have been 
immoral people, and criminals and drunkards, and 143 
feeble-minded. Later the young man first spoken of 
above married a good woman of sound mind and char¬ 
acter. There have been 49G descendants from this 
marriage, and all of them have been excellent citizens, 
and many of them prominent in business life and the 
professions. Heredity or the passing on of traits from 
parent to offspring is a subject of which we do not 
know so very much at present, but we do know that 
certain things like feeble-mindedness may be passed on 
to the children through generation after generation for 
centuries. 


199 


200 


PLAY FAIR 


How long ago our first parents, Adam and Eve, lived, 
we do not know. The Old Testament does not tell us. 
One calculation from the Old Testament puts the date 
at 4004 B.C., but other calculations on the same writ¬ 
ings put it very much longer. The Old Testament 
itself nowhere gives the date. The date is in no sense 
a question of faith, and does not matter. Adam and 
Eve played traitor to the trust God put in them, and 
we their children have inherited their disgrace and 
stain, as the descendants of Benedict Arnold and of the 
Kallikaks have inherited the disgrace and stain of their 
ancestors. We call this stain original sin. We are 
born into the world with this blot on our souls. It is 
washed away through the Sacrament of Baptism which 
Catholic boys receive in infancy, usually a week or two 
after they are born. “Going therefore,” were Our 
Lord’s parting words to His Apostles before He ascended 
into heaven, “teach ye all nations, baptizing them in 
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the 
Holy Ghost.” 

Some boys would perhaps say: If it had not betn 
for original sin, life would be just one long baseball 
game and camping trip; there would be no plugging 
for exams and no getting out of bed early on cold winter 
mornings. Maybe. But after all, we do not have to 
be sent to the hospital on account of these little in¬ 
conveniences, and we manage to get a good deal of 
baseball and other fun, notwithstanding original sin. 

A wealthy man takes a liking to a ragged orphan 
on the streets. The man takes him home, gives him 
every comfort, sends him to college, gives him spending 
money, and treats him as he would his own son. The 
boy grows up to manhood. One day the man finds the 
boy has forged his benefactor’s name to a large check. 


OUR FATHER 


201 


He calls the boy and says to him: “Our agreement is at 
an end; from now on you will have to shift for yourself.” 
Certainly the man does the boy no injustice, does he? 

Sometime later the boy falls from a canoe and is 
drowning. His benefactor happens along at the 
moment, jumps in and saves the boy’s life, and in doing 
so loses his own. When the man’s will is opened, it is 
found that he has left everything he possesses to the 
boy who treated him so shabbily and whom he had 
died to save. 

“Greater love has no man for another than to lay 
down his life for his friend.” If in original sin we see 
God’s justice, in Our Lord’s death for us on the cross 
we see as clear as the noonday sun His mercy and 
infinite love. To understand original sin we must look 
at it in the light of the Redemption. All that we lost 
by original sin, He more than regained for us on Calvary, 
The youngest child and the most ignorant savage can 
understand that a man who lays down his life to save 
yours has made the supreme sacrifice of love. 

Some years ago a drowning person was saved at an 
Atlantic seaside resort. The life-guard got the person 
to land with extreme difficulty and with imminent 
danger to his own life, for, if I recall rightly, there was 
a powerful undertow running. The rescued person, 
after being given first aid, came to, and from a pocket- 
book drew out a fifty-cent piece and offered it to the 
panting life-guard! Have you ever met folks whose 
gratitude to God was of the fifty-cent kind? 

After all, what concerns us most is not original sin, 
which Adam and Eve committed, but the actual sins 
which we ourselves commit. Laws, as we have seen, 
protect our rights and liberties. God, from His very 
love of us, must maintain His laws. What would we 


202 


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think of a man who would permit his five-year old son 
to play with a loaded pistol in a crowded room, or with 
a box of matches in a crowded gunpowder factor} 7 , or 
with a quantity of mustard gas? Both the boy and 
the by-standers would be placed in the peril of their 
lives. Nor certainly would a boy who had any love 
for his father, curse him or strike him or fail to show 
him respect. 

By actual sin, we do harm to God or to our neighbor 
or to both, as well as to ourselves. God loves us. 
Hence his laws. He expects us to treat our neighbor 
and Himself decently. Hence eternity of happiness or 
of unhappiness. We have the use of reason. He 
treats us as men, not as helpless and irresponsible 
infants. He expects us to act as men, for He gives us 
responsibility and trust as men. Our eternity hangs 
on our fidelity to this trust, on our own trust¬ 
worthiness. 

“Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the 
kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the 
world. Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting 
fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.’ 5 
These are strong words from the gentle lips of Christ. 
They need no comment. Eternity with God or eter¬ 
nity away from God. Eternity, unending, undying life 
of utter happiness or utter unhappiness. The choice 
is in our own hands. 

We do not have to go the the wilds of Africa or to 
the South Sea Islands for adventure. Life itself is the 
biggest of all adventures with the greatest of all stakes, 
eternity, at hazard. There is but one thing that can 
cheat us out of victory, and that one thing is mortal 
sin, and mortal sin comes through temptation, and 
temptation begins with little temptations and is power- 


OUR FATHER 


203 


less if you are alert and give it a knockout blow at the 
first moment it comes. 

I read some time ago of a man who braced himself 
against a standing auto, and the chauffeur was unable 
to get the machine started. Had the same man, even 
were he Hercules himself, stood in the path of the same 
machine after it had gotten headway, what chance, do 



Photo by J. S. Ligou. Courtesy of U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey 


THE IRON GRIP 
This wolf fooled with a temptation 

you think, would he have had of stopping it? It is an 
easy thing, for instance, never to start drinking. It 
is not so easy a thing to stop drinking once it has gotten 
headway in a man’s life. 

A story is told of a zoo superintendent who one day 
opened the cage wdiere he kept a poisonous snake, and 
picked up the reptile, grasping it firmly just back of 
the head. Held by this grip, the snake was harmless. 
The man went on to explain to some visitors the habits 






204 


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of this snake. Meanwhile the beast was cunningly 
coiling its lithe body around the man’s forearm. Before 
the man realized wdiat was happening, the circulation 
in his forearm was shut off, his muscles relaxed, his 
grip was lost, and the reptile, turning, bit him again 
and again before it could be checked. 

Keeping your eyes open goes a long way towards 
keeping straight. An unclean thought, for instance, is 
quite harmless, if you scotch it by turning your mind 
at once with decision to your hobbies or games or any¬ 
thing you are interested in, but the boy who dallies 
and lets it get its deadly grip on him will soon feel its 
fangs in his arm and its fatal poison in his soul. “ Watch 
ye and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.” 

The best man may sometimes trip and tumble. 
“The just man falls seven times a day,” but, as some 
one has added, he doesn’t wallow. A man who honestly 
loves God and takes Him seriously may nevertheless fall 
into venial sins. Should he have the misfortune to 
fall deeper, into mortal sin, God does not abandon him. 
To help him get on his feet again and to get a clean 
start, Our Lord instituted the sacrament of Penance. 
“Receive ye the Holy Ghost,” said Our Lord to His 
disciples, “whose sins you shall forgive, they are for¬ 
given them: and whose sins you shall retain, they are 
retained.” 

Of course, most of us would rather play baseball than 
go to confession. But after all, if our hearts are in the 
right place and we mean business, confession is very 
easy. And we all know how much it helps us to keep 
straight, and we all know how light and strong and 
cheerful we feel after it. It is like jumping into the old 
swimming hole. Looks a little chilly before we dive 
in, but we come out with a smile that won’t come off. 


OUR FATHER 


205 


There are two chief things to think about when we go 
to confession, to confess our sins and to be sorry for 
them. Here are just a few practical points. 

Take plenty of time preparing before you come into 
the confessional, ten minutes at least. Spend two- 
thirds of this time on awakening sorrow and only one- 
third on examining your conscience; not vice versa. 

It is by all means best to confess venial or lesser sins, 
although there is no strict obligation. Confess them 
because they often easily lead into habits of more 
serious sin, and the priest can help you while there is 
still time. Do you recall the auto and the snake we 
have spoken of just above? If there be a mortal sin to 
confess and it was committed more than once, state 
the number of times it was committed. Some boys 
seem to be like the man who confessed: “Father, I got 
drunk/’ “How often? More than once?” “Father, 
I didn’t come here to brag about it!” When you con¬ 
fess the number of times, the priest will not think you 
are bragging! 

Contrition or sorrow is like a dreadnaught. Its guns 
point both fore and aft, towards both future and past. 
Contrition is sorrow for the past and determination for 
the future. It is not enough to be able to say in a 
flabby half-hearted way: “I shall try to be better,” or 
“I would like to do better.” Here is a simple test of 
your sorrow: “I regret what I did; if I had the chance 
over again, I would not do it; and I have made up my 
mind not to do it again.” If you can say that and 
mean it, you have sorrow. 

If there were a thorn or nail in the foot of your pet 
collie or even of a stray dog, you would of course spare 
no trouble or time to take it out and help the suffering 
beast. What of the thorns and nails as Our Lord hung 


206 


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upon the cross? Our sins press down the thorns and 
hammer in the nails. 

There are probably few indeed who do not at times 
at least, as for instance when they kiss the cross on 
Good Friday, feel something of unselfish and perfect 
love of God and of Our Lord and Leader. And I 



(g) Underwood and Underwood 


A\FOUR-YARD GAIN 


God, like an expert athletic coach, sometimes trains us through our own 
mistakes, to make greater gains afterwards 


think that perhaps at nearly all times there is a touch 
at least of this generosity and unselfishness. Imper¬ 
fect contrition, that is, sorrow for sin because through 
mortal sin we risk our own eternity, will suffice, it is 
true, for confession. But to be satisfied entirely with 
such selfish sorrow is to run the risk of not being sorry 
at all. Suppose, for instance, a man should say: “I 
am sorry for my sins because through them I may lose 
heaven and suffer hell, but if there were no heaven or 




OUR FATHER 


207 


hell I would snap my fingers at God and kick the ten 
commandments into the ash-heap.” This would not 
be sorrow at all, but would instead be contempt of God. 

When you jump a deep ditch, you try to land a 
couple of feet beyond the other bank. When you go to 
confession, do the same. Do not be satisfied with 
what you think mere imperfect contrition. There is 
danger of having no contrition at all. Make your con¬ 
trition as perfect as you can make it. Be sorry out of 
love of God as unselfish as you can attain. 

Our heavenly Father is infinitely merciful and for¬ 
giving. Though our sins be as scarlet he will wash them 
white as snow. Not once, but seven and seventy times 
seven times. But He expects us to treat Him decently. 
And that is the least we can do, don’t you think so? 

Through Confession, God not only forgives us the 
wrong we have done, but helps us to do better. He 
brings good out of evil. A good football coach helps 
his men to learn by their own mistakes. So God helps 
us through confession to learn courage and loyalty 
even from our sins. 


CHAPTER XXV 
Reverence 

One day not many years ago, at Bagamayo, a town 
on the eastern coast of Africa, a European was about to 
depart with his caravan of native black African porters 
in search of ivory in the interior of the continent. As 
the caravan was starting, the head porter uttered a 
short prayer to God: “May God prosper and protect 
us!” “God!” remarked the European blasphemously, 
“My money and my rifle are enough God for me.” 
The porters looked at one another aghast, laid down 
their packs, and quitted him at once. The European 
asked a Catholic missionary to use his influence with 
the natives to get them to start, but they firmly 
replied: “No. This man is a scoundrel. Didn’t you 
hear him insult God? If we go with him, disaster will 
overtake us.” And they went away and left him. 

Yet we call such people savages! People with such 
a deep sense of reverence to God. All peoples, however 
low in the scale of what we consider civilization, have 
some kind of religion, some idea of a supernatural 
power whom they worship by prayer or sacrifice or both. 
Yet they do not see all the wonders in the universe 
that we who are educated see. “God, who made the 
world and all things therein, who giveth to all life and 
breath, and all things, and hath made of one, all man¬ 
kind, to dwell upon the whole face of the earth,” is 
“not far from every one of us: for in him we live and 
move and be.” The least civilized man holds sacred 
the reverence in his heart, and his religion means the 
soul of his life. 


208 


Courtesy of Bureau of American Ethnology 


WOLF PLUME, A BLACKFOOT CHIEF 

The Blackfeet are among the sturdiest and finest of the 

American Indians 



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When the white man went among the Pueblo Indians, 
they were greatly shocked to see him plant his crops 
without praying for the harvest. Religion w T as not a 
Sunday affair with the Indian. Many of his prayers 
have a wondrous beauty and dignity. Read for in¬ 
stance these prayers of a Blackfoot chief in the Sun¬ 
dance ceremony: 

“Great Spirit! have pity on me and my people. Help 
me to be pure and to lead a straight life. Grant that 
I may be kind-hearted to all my people, and may our 
children and relatives live to be old.” 

“Great Sun Power! I am praying for my people 
that they may be happy in the summer and that they 
may live through the cold of winter. Many are sick 
and in want. Pity them and let them survive. 

“Great Spirit! bless our children, friends, and visitors 
through a happy life. May our trails lie straight and 
level before us. Let us live to be old. We are all 
your children and ask these things with good hearts.” 

We have no state religion in America. But, as we 
have seen, our best laws and customs and our very 
liberties have grown out of our Christian religion. 
And the state throws its protecting arms over all 
religions that are honest and law-abiding. The spirit 
of tolerance, fair play, and teamplay is one of our most 
cherished American inheritances. But religion is in 
the heart of the American people. It would be a sorry 
day for us were it not. “ The-parchment on which the 
constitution and laws of a country are written might as 
well be used for drumheads when reverence and 
obedience have departed from the hearts of its people.” 
The reverence and obedience to which we are trained 
as Catholics is one of the Church’s greatest gifts to this 
the country we love. 


REVERENCE 


211 


Reverence begins for us Catholics with three chief 
things, reverence for God’s holy name, reverence in 
prayer, and reverence at Mass and communion. 

Some time ago I visited a camp on a nearby river. 
One of the camp rules read as follows: “There is"a dam 



U. B. Official 


IN THE CHURCH OF JOAN OF ARC 

Reverence and courage are old mates. Our American Catholic soldiers 

overseas made good on both scores 


in the neighborhood, but that’s no reason for bringing 
it into the conversation.” Boys sometimes think that 
the use of this word, spelt a little differently but pro¬ 
nounced the same, is a mortal sin. This is an unfor¬ 
tunate error. It is not a mortal sin and may not be a 
sin at all. But here’s the difficulty: The boy who uses 
it to-day without God’s name in front of it will, ten 
chances to one, drift into the habit sooner or later of 
























212 


PLAY FAIR 


using it with God’s name in front of it. Recall again 
the stories of the auto and the snake in the last chapter. 
Certainly using God’s name thus is irreverent. 

One of the finest Catholic societies of men in the 
country is the Holy Name Society. Protestant minis¬ 
ters themselves have spoken time and time again with 
unstinted and enthusiastic praise of the great work of 
this big organization with its branches in thousands of 
parishes of the land. This splendid body of tens of 
thousands of Catholic men stands for a big principle, 
the principle of “Clean Speech.” They believe that 
the name of Our Father in heaven is sacred. They 
believe that at the very least as much respect is due 
it as is due the name of our fathers and mothers here 
on earth. If another boy talks slurringly or insultingly 
of your own father or mother, how do you feel and what 
do you do? They believe that the place and the only 
place to use His holy name is on our knees in prayer. 

There is not much to say about prayer. In fact we 
can almost put all that need be said in two words: 
“Do it.” Praying after all is nothing more than 
talking to God. 

A boy who knows code signaling can talk in two 
ways. He can talk in words or he can talk in signs and 
gestures. In code signaling you carry on a conversation 
or send a message over long distances without using 
your voice at all. You talk with your arms and your 
flags! Even without codes, in our everyday life we do 
a lot of talking without words. When you salute the 
flag you express your thoughts and feelings just as 
clearly as when you sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ 
If a boy stalks up to you and shakes his fist in your face, 
he may not utter a word, but you know that he means 
something. 


REVERENCE 


213 


In tlie same manner, when we talk to God in prayer, 
we can do so in words or in gestures. Making the 
sign of the cross is just as truly an act of faith as is the 
familiar Act of Faith you say at your night prayers. 
Tipping your hat when you pass a Catholic church is 
as real a prayer as saying the Apostles’ Creed. Wearing 
the scapular is as real a prayer as reciting the Hail 
Mary. Kneeling at prayers morning and night or 
bowing your head at the consecration of the Mass is a 
true prayer of reverence. Of course, as in all prayers, 
we have to mean it and not let it become machine-like. 
In the Orient some of the Buddhists use prayer-wheels. 
A prayer is written on a piece of paper, the piece of 
paper is attached to a wheel, the wheel is kept revolving 
by a windmill arrangement. This plan saves a lot of 
trouble. The prayer-wheel does your praying for you, 
and keeps on the job night and day! 

In a fifty-yard dash, the two most important things 
are to get a clean and good start and of course to make 
a good finish. “Good morning” to God and “Good 
night” to Him in our morning and night prayers make 
the best start and the best finish of the day. Then 
too it is a matter of simple courtesy to God. Don't 
vou think so? 

In the Our Father we pray for one another. We 
say, “Our Father,” “Give us this day our daily bread,” 
“Forgive us our trespasses”—not my Father, or give 
me, or forgive me. As we pray for one another, so we 
may ask one another’s prayers. This gives us a chance 
to do good turns for one another. We are all members 
of God’s family on earth. But God’s family is even 
larger. It includes the angels and saints, all who are in 
heaven and all who are awaiting in purgatory the time 
when they will enter heaven. 


214 


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A family without love is a ship without sails or steam, 
an auto without an engine or gasoline. And love 
means good turns. So we can ask the saints and Our 
Blessed Mother to pray for us, to do us good turns, 
just as we on earth can pray for the souls in purgatory 
and do them good turns. Strictly speaking we do not 
pray to the saints. We pray to God only, for God only 
can answer prayers. As for the saints, we ask them 
to pray to God for us. When in the Apostles’ Creed 
we say, “I believe in the communion of saints,” we 
mean above all this exchange of kindnesses and good 
turns between all of God’s great family on earth, in 
purgatory, and in heaven. 

Have you ever heard of “chain prayers”? Some 
day you may get an unsigned letter that reads about as 
follows: “To-day and for the next nine days say the 
enclosed prayer, and send an exact copy of this letter 
to nine people. If you do not, a great calamity will 
happen to you.” In recent years, a number of such 
chain prayers have been going around through the 
mails. In some cities the postoffice has been choked 
by thousands of letters as a result. Such things are of 
course pure superstition, but some uninformed folks 
become worried over them. 

Superstition wrongs God. It also wrongs our fellow- 
men, and at times grievously. Take for instance the 
poor old women who in past times have been put to 
death on the foolish charge of being witches and riding 
broomsticks through the air to devils’ meetings. Some 
of the Hudson Bay Indians believe that an ill person is 
possessed by a devil, and so they kill the sick man. 
In India and in many other parts of the world, wives 
used to commit suicide at the graves of their husbands, 
because they thought they ought to join their husbands 


REVERENCE 


215 


in the future life. A Buddhist might abandon his wife 
and children to go off in the wilderness to meditate, 
and think he was doing a fine religious thing. In this 
country we would have him arrested for deserting his 
family. In Africa and other parts of the world hun¬ 
dreds of innocent people are put to death every year 
because they are thought to have worked spells and 
witchcraft on other folks. Some years ago a colored 
woman was arrested in Louisiana on the charge of 
having killed fifteen people. She confessed to having 
shed the blood of seventeen with her own hands, but 
she said that her religion had commanded her to 
do so! 

So the list could be multiplied until it became a book 
and a whole library. The Catholic Church, in con¬ 
demning superstition so strongly, is thereby defending 
not only the honor of God but also the welfare of men. 
Education is of course her great ally in this struggle 
that has lasted for nearly two thousand years. Being 
superstitious about the number thirteen or about black 
cats crossing your path may not be very serious, but 
consulting so-called fortune-tellers and trying to call 
up dead spirits is a graver matter. These things open 
the way to still more harmful superstitions. And 
superstitions have perhaps done mankind more harm 
than famine, plague, and war. 

To change the subject: Have you ever been home¬ 
sick? Grown men, you know, may get just as homesick 
as boys. Ask any of the soldiers who went across the 
Atlantic in the last war. We get homesick when we 
are separated from those whom we love. 

Do you think that God could get homesick for us? 
He wants to be with us. He came on earth, but after 
thirty-three years ascended into heaven. So He took 


216 


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a wav to remain with us even after His ascension. Can 
you guess how? 

Yes, through the Blessed Eucharist. “This is my 
body. This is my blood. Do this in commemoration 
of me.” These are His words uttered at the Last 
Supper when He took the bread and wine and blessed 
and gave to His disciples. 

The Mass is the continuation of this Last Supper as 
it is also the renewing of the Sacrifice of the Cross. In 
the Mass the selfsame words are said in the name of 
Our Lord by the priest, and the bread and w T ine are 
changed into the body and blood of Our Saviour at the 
consecration. When we assist at Mass, we are assist¬ 
ing at the sacrifice of Calvary itself. Naturally then 
we believe a loval Catholic will in turn make any 
sacrifice to hear .Mass on Sundays and holydavs. 

A great many of our big league baseball players are 
fine practical, and loyal Catholics, as you know\ Harry 
Heilmann the great American League batter w T rote 
recently of Hughie Jennings: “There is one thing for 
which I will always admire him and that is for his out¬ 
standing Catholicity. He always went out of his wav 
to permit his men to attend Mass on Sundays. He 
studied railroad schedules carefully and often when we 
were on training trips he would telegraph ahead of the 
train to be sure of the hours of Masses in towns where 
we were to stop.” 

Those who are not Catholics often wonder what it is 
about the Mass that attracts thousands of our Catholic 
people on the coldest and stormiest days. In some 
cities it has been necessary to have masses at two 
o’clock in the morning for the newspaper printers and 
other night workers. Non-Catholics wonder why 
we crowd our churches on Sunday morning and show 


REVERENCE 


217 


such deep reverence and keep such strict silence. We 
know. And others wonder when they attend benedic¬ 
tion or notice people during weekdays and at lunch 
hours downtown drop into church a few moments to 
pray. We know that Our Lord is present on the altar 
at Mass and in the tabernacle during the whole day 



Courtesy San Francisco District Council, Boy Scouts of America 


MASS IN BOY SCOUT TRAINING CAMP 
God set aside Sunday for prayer and play to help us keep both soul and 
body strong and hardy. Father Hunt saying Mass for Catholic boys 

and night,—waiting for us, waiting for us because He 
loves us, and waiting for us to come to Him that He 
might help us. 

He comes even closer. In Holy Communion we 
receive Him even into our hearts. Who does not feel 
His strong and kind and gentle presence within him 
after receiving at the altar? We prepare by a good 




218 


PLAY FAIR 


confession beforehand and by keeping from all food 
and drink from midnight. We prepare in body and 
soul for His coming, as we prepare for guests in our 
homes. 

There is no royal road to heaven. We all travel the 
same road. And there are many hills on it. But if 
there be any one road more than another that will lead 
safely to heaven, that road is the road of frequent 
communion,—weekly, and if possible even oftener. 

A fair estimate would put it that two out of three 
Catholics who die do not know at the time that they 
are about to die. Those around them unfairly and 
unjustly keep the truth from them and buoy them up 
with all sorts of lies about their getting well soon. 
Sometimes when the priest comes the man is already 
unconscious. If the priest knows the man has not led 
a practical Catholic life, he anoints him with a heart 
full of misgivings. But if he knows the man has been 
a frequent communicant, he has few fears regarding 
him. 

At one Catholic college I know, throughout the whole 
Lenten season of 1920, an average of more than five 
hundred college men received Holy Communion daily, 
and during the rest of the year an average of more than 
four hundred received daily. Incidentally that same 
college has one of the highest records for athletics in 
the country. They belisve in keeping both their 
souls and their bodies strong, robust and on the winning 
road. 


CHAPTER XXVI 
Catholics and Their Church 

Have you ever looked into the works of a watch? 
Or better still, have you ever taken apart an old Inger- 
soll, or an old alarm clock? I heard of a boy who once 
took an old clock apart, and when he put the wheels and 
springs and other things together he had enough parts 
left over to make a second clock! Have you ever un¬ 
covered and unraveled a used-up baseball to see what 
was inside it? We are going to take a look now into 
the inside, the “works,” the machinery of the Catholic 
Church to which you and I belong. And a gigantic 
piece of machinery it is. 

The machinery of the Catholic Church is set up as 
follows: First you have the parish with the parish 
priest in charge. A number of parishes make up a 
diocese under the leadership of the bishop. All the 
dioceses in the world are in turn responsible to the 
supreme leadership of our holy father the Pope. In 
this way a sort of network is thrown over the whole 
world, dividing the inhabited world into larger sections 
like net meshes, and each of these larger sections in turn 
divided into smaller sub-sections, that is into parishes. 
Were you to travel into the wildest parts of the world, 
.from the jungles of the Congo to the snows of Alaska, 
you will ever be in some diocese or parish. 

Some city parishes may be only a few blocks square. 
Some parishes in sparsely settled districts where 
Catholics are few may include many thousand square 
miles. A sick call to a dying man in this last case may 
mean a trip by horseback of a hundred miles where 

219 


220 


PLAY FAIR 


railroad or auto transportation cannot be had. At one 
such mission parish I visited several years ago, I had 
to travel forty miles north of the farthest north railroad 
by canoe to reach the little chapel. When I arrived I 
found that the pastor had departed some days before 
with a couple of Indians as guides and assistants on 



BUILDING A LOG CHAPEL IN THE NORTHERN WOODS 

A little chapel a-building at Obidjuan, at the headwaters of the 
St. Maurice, as truly a Catholic church as St. Peter’s at Rome. 
When we reached here, the pastor, Father Guinard, was in another 
part of his parish nearly two hundred miles away, a two-weeks’ 

trip in canoe 


a mission journey over rough trails and lakes and rivers 
by canoe to look after the souls of his parishioners on 
the Labrador frontier nearly two hundred miles farther 
north. 

What do parish priests and their assistants do in an 
ordinary city parish? Here are a few of the things. 








CATHOLICS AND THEIR CHURCH 


221 


They say Mass each morning, hear confessions about 
eighty afternoons and nights of the year, preach on 
Sundays and holydays. These are the most evident 
and common things and many people seem to think 
that this is all there is to be done. But there are a 
great many other duties calling the priest. Baptisms, 
marriages, and funerals must be looked after. Sick 
calls, hospital visiting, communion to invalids are daily 
concerns. Parish societies and sodalities require atten¬ 
tion. No hour of the day passes as a rule without visits 
or phone calls at the rectory. People come for advice 
or for aid or for any of a score of purposes. Converts 
come for instruction. The priest in turn has many 
visits to make among his people, visits of condolence, 
visits to backsliders, visits to the homes of the poor 
and needy. 

Then there are a great many letters to read and write, 
maybe several each day. The finances of the church 
have to be given much attention. Business people 
do not care to be paid only in prayers for coal and 
groceries delivered. A careful system of bookkeeping 
is necessary to keep the parish accounts accurate and 
orderly. Besides, no little time is required by the 
pastor in looking after repairs and equipment of the 
church and rectory,—a leaky roof, a clogged furnace, 
a new coat of varnish on the pews. Churches, like 
autos, constantly need repairs and new equipment. 

The Sunday school calls for much attention, and 
where there is a parish day school still more thought and 
care and labor must be devoted to it. In addition 
there are a great many occasional duties connected 
with fairs, bazars, lawn parties, picnics, entertainments, 
celebrations, Forty Hour devotions, May processions,, 
missions, commencements, and so forth, not to mention 


222 


PLAY FAIR 


a house-to-house census of the parish from time to 
time, in many parishes every year. 

After his official duties are over, the priest has his 
personal affairs and his personal duties to look after, 
such as saying his breviary, his rosary, his other 
prayers and devotions. It takes nearly an hour each 
day to say the breviary, which is the official daily 
prayer for all who have received Holy Orders. Then 
comes the period which should be given to study if he 
wants to make the most of his labor and keep fresh and 
awake to what is going on in the world of thought and 
action. He must keep abreast of the times, for the 
priest is the leader of his people, who expect him to lead 
them intelligently in their attitudes and action as 
Catholics in the big movements of the day that bear on 
religion. 

In nearly all countries of the world more priests are 
urgently needed. Even in Catholic countries like 
Italy and Spain there is only one priest on the average 
to about each five hundred Catholics, in Ireland, France 
and Austria one to about nine hundred, and in Ger¬ 
many one to about thirteen hundred, while in some 
countries of South America each priest has on the 
average as high as three to five or more thousand people 
to look after. In the United States there are at least 
from seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred Catholics 
to each priest engaged in parish work. When we recall 
that among the non-Catholic churches in the United 
States, the average is about one clergyman or minister 
to every one hundred and forty church members, it 
will be clear that a priest, to fulfill his duties to his 
parishioners, has to keep pretty close to his task and 
cannot fall back on any eight-hour day plan. As the 
parish priest has all these duties to perform, you can 


CATHOLICS AND THEIR CHURCH 


223 


easily understand why he is grateful to his people, and 
to the boys of the parish especially, when they help 
lighten his burdens by loyal support and filial obedience. 

A parish is a big family. No one person can do 
everything, however hard he may work. So parish 
priest and people all work together to make the parish 
a success. I know of one parish of colored people who 
when the time came to build a new church gave hours 
and days of their labor to build it, working late into the 
evenings and on holidays at digging the foundations, 
and laying the bricks, and putting on the roof. This 
is parish teamwork. 

By the way, what are you doing to help along in your 
parish? 

A number of parishes together form a diocese, and 
at the head of each diocese is a bishop or archbishop or 
cardinal. It was the bishop of your diocese, or some 
other bishop acting in his place, you will remember, who 
confirmed you. Two of the sacraments are conferred 
only by bishops. These sacraments are Confirmation 
and Holy Orders. Of course the bishop has many 
duties besides conferring these two sacraments. He 
has not only one church or parish but many churches 
to look after. There may be as many as several hun¬ 
dred churches in one diocese. In the United States 
there are over one hundred dioceses and in the whole 
world there are roughly speaking about one thousand 
dioceses and archdioceses. 

When you speak to a priest, you of course address him 
as ‘Father.’ Now if you should happen to meet a 
bishop, you address him simply as ‘Bishop,’ while an 
archbishop is addressed as ‘ Your Grace ’ and a cardinal 
as ‘Your Eminence.’ Bishops and archbishops wear 
ordinarily a purple cassock and cardinals a red one. 


224 


PLAY FAIR 


Purple is the ancient symbol of authority and red 
reminds us of the martyrs who shed their blood for their 
faith. 

The thousand or more dioceses of the world are under 
the Pope, the bishop of Rome. The first pope was St. 
Peter who was appointed by Our Lord Himself. “Thou 
art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, 
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” St. 
Peter first labored in Jerusalem, but finally went to 
Rome where he was martyred under the Emperor Nero. 
The race course where he was put to death was just 
alongside the present basilica of St. Peter, the largest 
church in the world. I have seen crowds in the church 
estimated at seventy-five thousand, and yet there was 
room for many thousands more. St. Peter’s body still 
rests beneath the altar in the crypt of the church. 

Rome is to the Catholic Church what a hub is to a 
wheel, or what a powerhouse is to an American street 
railway system, or what Washington is to the United 
States. All nations are represented there in the 
church circles. For instance, at the school where we 
studied in preparation for the priesthood, forty different 
languages were spoken. Happily, not all were spoken 
at the same time! All our lectures or lessons had to 
be given and recited or written in Latin, the only 
language which everyone could speak, write, and 
understand. The Church is made up of peoples speak¬ 
ing all the chief languages spoken in the whole world, 
and so she has to have one universal language, Latin, 
which she also uses in her liturgy and ceremonies, and 
which you hear each Sunday at Mass. 

I think we will all agree that the Pope has a big job, 
in fact the biggest job in the whole world to-day. Our 
Lord naturally foresaw how tremendous his task would 


CATHOLICS AND THEIR CHURCH 


225 


be, so He gave St. Peter and the popes, the successors 
of St. Peter, authority to govern the church. You 
can’t run a street car without a conductor, or a winning 
baseball or basketball or football team without a 
captain. Much less could such a vast society as the 
Catholic Church with her three hundred million mem¬ 
bers be run without someone in charge. 

The Pope has not only to govern but to teach. In 
order to make sure that he would teach the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as taught by 
Our Saviour Himself, Our Lord gave the Pope and the 
Church the promise of unfailing truthfulness, or infalli¬ 
bility. He promised the Spirit of Truth Himself, the 
Holy Ghost who would remain with the church to the 
end of time. 

In the United States we have our Constitution, our 
national charter of rights and laws. When any doubt 
occurs as to the meaning of any section of the Constitu¬ 
tion, the case is presented to the Supreme Court and a 
final decision is rendered that is binding on the whole 
country. Every one can easily see how necessary a 
Supreme Court is. 

We have something like this in the Church. When¬ 
ever some question arises on a matter of faith or morals, 
as taught for instance in the Bible, the final decision is 
given by the Pope or by the Pope acting together with 
all the bishops of the world, and this decision is final, 
and God guarantees that the decision will be the right 
and truthful one* 

Of course, this does not mean that the Pope issues 
infallible decisions every day or so. Such decisions 
are rendered only from time to time. There have 
been only two since the beginning of the last century. 
Nor again does it mean that the Pope is infallible 


226 


PLAY FAIR 


except in matters of faitli and morals, in matters of 
religion. The last two or three Popes for instance 
have been very much interested in athletics for boys. 
Shortly before his death, Benedict XV gave a reception 
to a great group of athletic and similar clubs for boys 



Photograph from Underwood and Underwood 


UP THE GLACIER SLOPE 

The Pope has the biggest and most responsible job on earth. He needs 
the best of health. Pope Pius XI kept himself physically fit for his life 
work by the hardy sport of mountain-climbing, and in his early years 
gained an international athletic record at this great sport 

and young fellows, and told them how glad he was to see 
them in the game. The present Pope Pius XI has a 
worldwide athletic record for his wonderful mountain¬ 
climbing feats performed when he was a little younger. 
But if the Pope were to umpire a baseball game, his 
decisions would not be infallible. For, while baseball 



CATHOLICS AND THEIR CHURCH 


227 


is a fine game and baseball rules are good things, they 
are not matters of faith or morals. 

You became a Catholic many years ago. You were 
only an infant at the time when you were brought to 
the church and the priest poured water on your head 
and said: “I baptize thee in the name of the Father 
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” You are a 
member of this great church founded by Our Lord 
Himself. Catholics work with and under their spiritual 
leaders, their parish priests first of all, next their 
bishop, and above all the Pope, the Holy Father. 
Many a Catholic and many a leader, priest, bishop, and 
pope, has died for the cause. We will not likely be 
called on to die for the cause. We are called on to live 
for it. And living for it means so living that we will be 
an honor to it, and so working for it that our work will 
speak for itself. 


CHAPTER XXVII 
Americans and Their Government 

Any boy who has been out in the woods for a week’s 
camping or even for an overnight camp knows that 
without a knowledge of campcraft and a pretty careful 
carrying out of this knowledge, a half or the whole of 
the outing’s fun can easily be spoiled. Not only do the 
campers need knowledge but they need teamwork. 
If there be only two boys camping together teamwork 
is an essential in sharing duties such as cooking, pitching 
tent, carrying grub and equipment, and so forth. And 
especially if the camping trip is going to last for some 
days the two boys have to be both sensible and con¬ 
genial. I read some time ago of tv r o prospectors camp¬ 
ing up in Alaska. Shortly after they w T ere snow^ed in 
for the wdnter, they quarreled. Then they divided 
their grub and supplies, shut themselves up each in 
one separate half of their log hut and did not speak to 
each other for the rest of the season. They must have 
had a pleasant time of it! 

Let us suppose that two of you are out camping. 
One day there suddenly pour into your camp tw y o 
thousand other boys from all quarters of the compass,— 
boys of all stripes and types, some of them decent chaps 
and some of them crooks; some of them with horse 
sense and brains and some w r ith an “Unfurnished 
Room” sign where their brains ought to be; some of 
them unselfish and thoughtful of the other fellows’ 
rights and some of them thinking only of number one; 
some of them experienced in the camping game and 
some of them not knowing the difference between a pup 
tent and a poncho. 

228 


AMERICANS AND THEIR GOVERNMENT _ 229 

What would happen? Confusion, quarrelling, over¬ 
crowding, unsanitary camp conditions, sickness, and 
what not. The camp would soon break up in disorder, 
unless what? How would you go about bringing 
order and good government out of anarchy? 

I daresay a few of the most intelligent among you 
would begin by gathering the whole disorderly mob 



Courtesy of Boy Scouts of America 


THE GANG’S ALL HERE 

If a crowd like this suddenly poured into your two-boy camp, the camp 
would break up in disorder, unless—what? 

together for a mass-meeting. After choosing a tem¬ 
porary chairman for your meeting you would discuss 
and decide on certain camp rules and regulations, re¬ 
garding tent sites, supplies of grub and firewood, cook¬ 
ing and meal serving, water supply and camp sanita¬ 
tion, safeguarding of each fellow’s personal property 
and equipment against thieves within or without the 




230 


PLAY FAIR 


camp, and so forth. In a word you would work out a 
scheme of camp laws. 

But laws do not run themselves automatically, any 
more than a Ford does. They are not even equipped 
with self-starters. Somebody must be on the job to 
carry them out and see that they are enforced, just as 
an umpire is needed to see that the laws or rules are 
enforced in a baseball game. So you would next 
choose in your meeting a leader and give him and his 
assistants authority and power to carry out your wishes 
as expressed in the camp laws. You would now have 
an executive force in your camp. 

In your big camp of two thousand boys, there would 
certainly arise from time to time disputes regarding, 
for instance, trespass on tent sites or ownership of 
anything from penknives to axes and tents. Besides, 
some of the boys would probably find it to their own 
selfish convenience to walk roughshod over the other 
fellows’ rights and to break the camp laws made for 
the benefit of the whole gang. Hence you would 
appoint certain boys to decide such questions of 
property and to determine whether the boy accused of 
breaking the camp laws really did so or not. So you 
would have a police and court system with judges. 

Each boy in the camp might arrange to bring in his 
own food, clothing, tent and equipment, but there are 
certain things which can be best bought by all the 
boys clubbing together and each chipping in a share of 
the expenses. The building of a diving board, the 
procuring of camp rowboats, canoes and launch, the 
purchase of large kitchen equipment for the dining 
tent,—these and a number of other expenses of the 
camp can be best met by having the whole crowd buy 
them and own them in common. This means that 


AMERICANS AND THEIR GOVERNMENT 


231 


every boy must contribute his fair share of the money 
required. You would rightly permit no sponging, if 
any of the fellows showed signs of this meanest kind of 
stinginess. In a word you would work out a fair plan 
of camp taxes. 

Now a community, a city, or state, or nation is very 
much like a big camp, only more so. Robinson Crusoe 
might live on a barren island as a hermit, but he did 
not do it from choice. We might enjoy the fun of it for 
a time. But the fact is we prefer in the long run to 
live not as hermits, but to live as human beings, that is, 
in big gangs, in communities, in society. That is our 
very nature. God made us that way. If you have 
ever had to spend even one night far off in the woods 
and wilderness all by yourself, you would remember 
that you felt to say the least rather lonely. Moreover, 
the more we advance in civilization, the more we 
depend on one another for even our daily bread. What 
for instance would the rest of us do, if suddenly all the 
farmers in the world went on a strike and refused to 
raise anything more to eat? We need one another’s 
help, and our strength and very lives depend on team¬ 
work. 

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, 

And the strength of the Wolf is the Pack. 

In your suddenly overgrown camp of two thousand 
boys, you needed laws, executives, courts and taxes. 
We need just these things when we live together in 
communities and nations. So in our American nation 
we have and must have laws for the common welfare 
of all; public officials chosen by the people to see that 
these laws are put into effect and carried out in the 
interest of us all; police, courts and judges to decide 


232 


PLAY FAIR 


disputes regarding rights and to protect the rest of us 
from the few lawbreakers; and taxes to carry on the 
work that is best and most cheaply done by the whole 
people for the whole people. Let us look a little more 
closely into the ‘works’ and machinery of the govern¬ 
ment, just as we looked into the ‘works’ and machinery 
of the Catholic Church in the last chapter. 



(g) Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation 


NEW YORK CITY FROM THE SKIES 

A section of lower New York. People are crowding together in big camps 
we call cities, states, and nations. For the common good, we need laws, 
executives, courts, and taxes,—as in a large boys’ camp 

In America the people make their own laws. Their 
laws are not made for them by kings. Long ago an 
old king boasted: “I am the state.” In America, you 
and I, all of us, are the state. It is our right, our 
privilege, and our duty to see that the laws ring true to 
the supreme law, to God's law, of fair play to all. 

But most of us are kept busy making our daily bread. 






AMERICANS AND THEIR GOVERNMENT 233 

We cannot give the whole of our time and thought to 
lawmaking. Besides no building or field in the coun¬ 
try would be large enough for us to get together in for 
mass-meetings and to discuss what laws should be 
passed. So we choose our agents, our representatives 
to be our lawmakers. We put them on their honor. 
W 7 e give them this sacred trust. Into their hands we 
commit our welfare. Faith and trust are necessary for 
our American life. As and only as we are trustworthy 
in boyhood can we expect to measure up to the trust¬ 
worthiness expected of American manhood. 

In cities we elect commissions or city councils as our 
agents to make the laws concerning our cities. In 
states we elect a state legislature, composed of two 
houses, the senate and the house of representatives or 
assembly, to pass laws for our states. For the whole 
nation we elect the United States Congress, made up of 
the Senate and the House of Representatives, to look 
after our interests through laws that affect the whole na¬ 
tion. The supreme law of the land, the law that protects 
our great deep rights of freedom is the Constitution 
which was adopted in 1787, a century and a third ago. 

In many cities and nearly half of our states, laws 
may be proposed, voted upon directly instead of by 
legislatures, and passed or rejected by a majority vote 
of the people. This plan is known as the initiative and 
referendum. 

The laws are the written will of the people, whether 
they be made by direct vote of the people or by repre¬ 
sentatives chosen by the people. The people moreover 
elect their own executives to see that the laws are 
properly carried out. The chief executives are called 
in cities the mayor or commissioners, in states the 
governor, and in the nation the President. 


234 


PLAY FAIR 


The people elect the President and Vice-President of 
the nation every four years. The President chooses his 
own assistants to head up the different departments of 
the National Government. The heads of these de¬ 
partments in turn choose their assistants by civil 



(c) Underwood and Underwood 

THE CAPITOL AT NIGHT 
Where the laws of the American nation are made 


service examinations which are intended to serve as a 
sieve that will let through into the public service only 
those qualified by intelligence and character for the 
tasks of honor that are entrusted to them. If we include 
the city and state employes with the employes of the 
national government, we find that it requires two 



AMERICANS AND THEIR GOVERNMENT 


235 


persons out of about every hundred in the United 
States to carry on the people’s work. 

As there are many kinds of laws,—city laws, state 
laws, and the nation’s laws,—so there are many kinds 
of courts. The simplest court of all is the justice of 
the peace court where small property or debt cases are 
settled. The highest court in the land is the Supreme 
Court of the United States. The nine judges of the 
Supreme Court are appointed for life by the President 
himself. 

In recent years nearly all our cities have established 
juvenile courts to deal with young offenders under the 
age usually of seventeen. The purpose back of the 
juvenile courts is to give the boy or girl a chance even 
though he or she has done wrong. The idea is not so 
much to punish but rather to help the boy get a new 
start if he has gotten a bad one. Only as a last meas¬ 
ure is a boy sent from the juvenile court to a reforma¬ 
tory. He is usually given a chance to make good by 
being put on what is called probation. The first 
juvenile court was established in this country at 
Chicago in 1899, although as far back as 1703 Pope 
Clement XI had started in Rome important reforms 
looking towards a more kindly and Christian treatment 
of the young offender. 

As boys we usually first learn of the ‘law’ by seeing 
the policeman walking along on his beat. But the 
policeman does many other things besides arresting 
people. He represents, it is true, the stern insistence 
of the people that selfish citizens shall not harm and 
injure the peaceful folks of the community. But 
besides this, he is the guide to the stranger and the lost 
child. He is the man who will risk his life to rescue 
a youngster or a grown person from a runaway or from 



236 


PLAY FAIR 


a burning house. Treat him half decently even, and 
meet him half way, and he is when all is said and done 
the boy’s best friend. It is he who protects the folks 
who stand for fair play from the few crooks, young or 
old, who stand for unfairness and violence. 

What the policeman is to the city, the army and 
navy are to the nation. Our national bird is the soaring 
eagle. Look on our nation’s coat-of-arms and you 
will find an eagle clutching a spray of olive in the talons 
of one foot and a bundle of arrows in the talons of the 
other. The spray of olive means that America is a 
peaceful and peace-loving nation. We send our ambassa¬ 
dors and ministers to every nation as workers for peace. 
We want peace with the world. All nations and races 
are brothers of one family, under Our Father in heaven, 
and all are brothers to our divine older Brother who 
died for all, to bring peace on earth to men of good-will. 

While we love peace, we love justice and fair play. 
We moreover stand on our right of self-defence. If 
any nation or people unjustly attacks us we stand ready 
to defend our homes and our countrv. Hence the 

t/ 

bundle of arrows. Not all citizens are free and physi¬ 
cally fit to go to war. So the nation needs an army and 
a navy, not an army or navy that goes around with a 
chip on its shoulder looking for trouble, but an army 
and navy ready, if need be, to defend with life itself 
the land, the people, and the flag we love. As I write 
these lines the whole nation is bowing its head in sorrow 
to do honor to the last earthly remains of the Unknown 
Hero who gave his life on the fields of France that 
America and freedom and justice might live. 

By the way, do you remember to say a prayer now 
and then for the poor fellows who as soldiers, sailors, or 
marines have laid down their lives for their country, 


AMERICANS AND THEIR GOVERNMENT 237 

for you and me. It would be a fine thing for you to 
attend Mass on All Souls’ Day for this intention or for 
your club to do so in a body. Some boys’ gangs and 
clubs make it a point of honor to visit and dress the 
graves of the soldiers, sailors, and marines on Decora¬ 
tion Day. Does yours? 

A few words only on the more material debts that 
nations must pay,—debts that are as nothing compared 
to the debt owed for lives offered up on the battlefield 
or the high seas. 

A government requiring the full-time services of two 
out of every hundred of its people cannot get along 
without great expenses. Let us remember what these 
expenses are for. We are not paying kings and royal 
families to live in luxury. We are paying through 
taxes our share of the camp expenses, so to speak. 
No one wants to be a sponge. An American boy 
particularly believes in the principle of paying his own 
way as he goes along. He does not want to sponge on 
others. Roads and streets, education, health depart¬ 
ments, army and navy, hospitals and courts,—these 
and the other things of government are provided by 
us all for us all. Each one, for instance, cannot have 
his own playground or park or school or streets or 
water main. So we all chip in and each bears his part 
of the expense just as each member of the club chips in 
to buy camp equipment and pay camping expenses for 
an outing in the woods. 

The chief taxes are raised on property, incomes, and 
inheritances. Those who have more should pay more 
in taxes, but everybody should give his share. In the 
last years you have been helping out in your share even 
in every movie ticket or soda water ticket you bought 
by paying your small war tax on each one. 



238 


PLAY FAIR 


Being a good citizen means of course voting when of 
age to vote, keeping up-to-date, awake, and informed 
on public questions, holding office if called upon to do 
so for the common good, and paying taxes honestly 
and squarely. But being a good citizen does not stop 
here. Nor need a boy wait until he is of voting age 
before taking part in the community life as a good 
citizen. The simple fact is that every time a boy does 
a good turn and every time he plays fair at home, in 
school, or on the playground he is practising in a very 
practical way good citizenship. Every time he does 
a work of mercy or lives up to the commandments of 
God, he is doing something for the welfare and good of 
his fellow-citizens. He is helping the needy, the sick, 
the poor, the suffering, the weak, or he is respecting 
the rights, the life, the property, the health, the good 
name, the well-being of his fellows in his community. 
Citizenship means doing all in our power for our fellows, 
whether through government and civic measures or 
through the good turns and fair dealings we show from 
man to man. A good Catholic is and therefore must 
be a good citizen. 


CHAPTER XXVIII 
Loyalty 

An American Catholic boy is loyal. What does that 
mean? Will the following story help us to clear up the 
meaning of loyalty? 

You have read, or perhaps heard in your own home, 
of the great famine of 1845 in Ireland, when the potato 
crop failed. Some of the old folks who passed through 
its horrors are still alive. The potato was to the Irish 
country folk what wheat and corn and bread are to us. 

When the killing blight appeared in the potato field, 
the stalks withered and the potatoes beneath the soil 
rotted. Famine and fever were unleashed upon the 
unhappy people, and last came deadly cholera. In 
recent months you have no doubt seen pictures in the 
movies or Sunday Supplements of Austrian, Russian, 
or Chinese famine victims, with their staring eyes, their 
hollow cheeks and shrunken bodies and limbs. The 
Irish famine victims looked not otherwise. Fathers 
and mothers, the aged and the newborn, died like 
stricken cattle. In their cabins, in the fields, on the 
very roads, they died in thousands, while other thou¬ 
sands fled to our American land of refuge. 

Food and supplies were rushed in by the generous 
and kind-hearted from other countries. America sent 
shiploads of corn and other foodstuffs. But even so, 
vast numbers died of sheer hunger and of disease. 
Nearly all who gave, gave out of the kindness of their 
hearts. But some few societies that opened depots 
for distributing food, gave only on condition that those 
who accepted it would give up their Catholic faith! 

239 


240 


PLAY FAIR 


A certain widow in the county of Kerry had three 
young sons. They were weak and dying from utter 
hunger. Across the way was one of these depots. The 
mother said to the oldest boy: “Go over, and show 
yourself at the depot. Perhaps the people there will 
have pity on you, and give you something to eat with¬ 
out asking you to play traitor to your faith.” But the 
boy answered without hesitation: “Death were better!” 

A boy who is loyal to a cause and to a leader does not 
ask himself: “How little can I do and what duties can 
I dodge?” but “How much can I do?” He does not 
ask himself: “What am I doing to get out of it,” but 
“What can I put into it?” “How can I help along 
the good work?” If he is loyal, say, to his baseball or 
football team, he does not play to the galleries at the 
risk of losing the game. Still less does he do anything 
to throw the game to the other team. He goes into the 
game for all he is worth. He strains every muscle and 
uses all the grey matter in his head to win,—to win not 
selfishly for himself, but unselfishly for the cause, for 
the team. 

A Catholic boy is loyal. He is loyal to his gang, to 
his club, to his chums. He will not stand for them 
being spoken ill of in his presence behind their backs. 
He scorns talebearing about them. He stands up for 
them. If they get into trouble, he stands by and helps 
them out. 

A Catholic is loyal to his home. He is loyal to the 
father and mother who have brought him into the 
world, who have spent their days and their nights for 
him, who have devoted all that they have and all that 
they are, to help make him a worthwhile fellow T as well 
as a happy one. He will defend with his fists if neces¬ 
sary their good name and honor. But his loyalty will 


LOYALTY 


241 


not stop with lip loyalty. He will do his part to give 
them in return obedience, sacrifice for sacrifice, love 
for love. 

As time goes on and the boy grows into manhood, 
this boyhood gratitude will likewise grow in strength 
and force. Business cares and other duties may come 
and go. But one duty will live on, the son's duty of 
rendering to his parents, now aging and feeble, the best 
he can to cheer and comfort and, if need be, support 
them, as long as Our Father in heaven permits them 
to stay with him here on earth. 

An American boy is loyal to his country and to his 
flag. He is loyal to the flag that has given him freedom, 
happiness, opportunity in the greatest country on 
which God ever smiled. A good American recognizes 
what is good in all peoples and has no place in his heart 
for narrow un-American and un-Cliristian hatred of the 
foreigner. He does not love mankind less for loving 
America more. To all peoples he reaches out his hand 
in honest friendship, and a friendship which he tries 
to back up with honest dealing and fair play and charity 
to every nation under the sun. The American motto 
is not: My country, right or wrong. But it is rather: 
My country, may she ever be right; if wrong, I shall 
do my part to set her right again. 

A Catholic boy is loyal to his Church and to his 
Divine Leader, with a loyalty that never dies, and a 
loyalty that will not falter in the presence of death 
itself. Yet he respects the sincerity of those who are 
not of the Church. It is said that shortly after Pius X 
became Pope in 1903, a visitor came to him and began 
speaking very harshly of Protestants. The Pope at 
once called his visitor to time with these words: ‘‘You 
cannot build up religion on the ruins of charity.” A 


242 


PLAY FAIR 


Catholic boy is true to the best Catholic and Ameri¬ 
can traditions of tolerance in regard to the religious 
beliefs of those who are not Catholics. He remembers 
that it was a Catholic, Lord Baltimore, who first pro¬ 
claimed religious liberty and tolerance in America. 

A Catholic boy will not sit by silently and hear his 
Church badly spoken of. He will defend it firmly, 
courageously, intelligently, kindly. Especially will he 
do it kindly, for he will remember what the great 



Courtesy of U. S. Forest Service 


THE MOUNTAIN TRAIL 
The trail that leads up to the mountain heights 

American and Catholic leader, Cardinal Gibbons, 
always insisted upon, namely, that bigotry itself is 
usually the result of wrong information given to the 
bigot, a sin of the head rather than a sin of the heart. 

People judge the Catholic Church by the lives of the 
Catholics they know or know of. A Catholic by the 
very fact that he is and is known to be a Catholic, is 
entrusted with the honor and good name of his Church. 
A Catholic who is loyal is true to this trust of honor. 




LOYALTY 


243 


A Catholic is loyal to the Divine Leader who died 
for him. Greater love hath no man for another than 
that he lay down his life for his friend. He is loyal 
to his Divine Saviour who comes to him in Holv 
Communion to help him along the trail of life, who 
fought and never faltered in the cause of truth and 
justice. His loyalty is not merely one of words, but 
above all of deeds, of honesty, and obedience, and 
charity, and purity, and reverence. He is loyal, should 
there be need, even to the supreme test of loyalty. 
And rather than fail in loyalty, he would bravely say, 
as did the martyrs of old and of recent times: “Death 
were better!” 

Fair play, then and all that it means in loyalty, and 
squareness, and service, is the key to success in the 
world of American and Catholic manhood. It is the 
trail that leads up to the mountain heights of this life 
and of the life to come. In work and in the game, at 
home and at school, for country and for Church, to man 
and to God, the American Catholic boy’s ideal is — 
Play Fatr. 


INDEX 


Abstinence, 120 
Accidents, 129-130 
Algue, 51-53 
Angels, 115, 148 

Animals, kindness to, 74, 119; in¬ 
telligence of, 116, 119 
Army, 193, 236 
Assumption, 152 

Banks, 107 
Baptism, 200, 227 
Big Brothers and Big Sisters, 58 
Bishops, 223 

Camping, 32, 67, 92-93, 228-231 
Catholic Church, population, 2; 

growth, 5-10; structure, 219-227 
Charity. See Works of Mercy 
Chastity, 142-153 
Child labor, 112-113 
Chivalry, 62-63, 151-152 
Cities, 38, 66-67 

Citizenship, 238. See Government 
Clinics. See Outpatient departments 
Columbus, Christopher, 3, 13 
Commandments, 80-173, 208-218 
Communion, Holy, 78-79, 150, 

215-218 

Communion of saints, 213-214 
Confession, 150, 204-207 
Confirmation, 190-191 
Conservation of resources, 91-96 
Contrition, 205-207 
Courage, 85, 190-198 
Courts, 77, 230-231, 235 

Damien, Father, 6-7 
Diocese, 223 

Drinking, 122-123, 126-127, 203 
244 


Education, 174-180, 215 
Eternity, 63, 119, 202-203 
Eucharist. See Communion, Holy 
Executives, 230-231, 233-235 
Extreme Unction, 23-24 

Family life, 137-143 
First Aid, 23-24, 30-31 
Forgiveness, 75-78 
Friendliness, 72-79, 157 

God, Our Father, 34, 75, 78, 90-93, 
119, 156, 181, 184, 207-211 
Good turns. See Works of Mercy 
Government, 69-71, 183, 189, 228- 

238 

Health, 114-123 
Health of others, 124-132 
High schools, 174-175 
Holy Name of God, 211-212 
Holy Name Society, 58, T80, 212 
Holy Orders. See Priesthood 
Holydays of obligation. See Sundays 
Home, 133-143, 185-186, 240-241 
Honesty, 80-82, 87-88, 97-113, 157- 
158, 195 

Honor, 84, 87-96 
Hospitals, 24-28 
Housing, 142-143 

Immaculate Conception, 152 
Immigrant Aid, 55-56, 71 
Immigrants and immigration, 4-5, 
54-56, 78 

Indians, conversion, 9; care of sick, 
24; honesty, 97-100; intelligence, 
117-118; courage, 191; prayers, 
209-211 


INDEX 


245 


Indulgences, 45 

Industry, modern, 107-113, 130, 
142-143, 159-161, 164-173, 183 
Infallibility, 225-227 
Infant mortality, 127-129 
Intelligence in charity, 37, 49-50 

Joan of Arc, 12-13, 

John the Baptist, 60-61 
Joseph, St., 113, 134 
Judgment, Last, 63, 119 
Juvenile courts, 235 

Labor. See Industry 

Law and liberty, 184-188 

Law of God, 105, 186-187 

Law of land, 105, 189, 230-233 

Leaders, 11-19 

Legal Aid, 56-58, 71 

Liberty, 181-189 

Liberty, religious, 182-185, 242 

Life, sacredness of, 103, 113,124-132 

Life saving, 31, 71 

Loyalty, 239-243 

Machinery, 107-113, 130, 159-161 
Marriage, 139-140, 196 
Mary, Blessed Virgin, 9, 134, 148, 
152-153 
Mass, 215-217 

Missions, 3, 7-9, 17, 75-76, 220 
Mothers’ pensions, 142 

Navy, 193, 236 

Newspapers, Catholic, 179-180 
Nursing of sick, 26, 28, 69, 71 

Obedience, 134, 136, 184-189, 202, 
241, 243 

Orphans, care of, 36, 38 
Our Lord, our Leader, ^16-19, 243; 
Resurrection, 18-19; care of sick, 
23, 129; of poor, 40; charity, 
61, 72-73; forgiveness, 76; loy¬ 
alty to truth, 85-86; at home, 
133-134; courage, 196 
Outpatient departments, 27 


Parishes, 219-220, 223 
Parks, national, 95, 163 
Pasteur, 21-22, 175 
Paul, St., 113, 120 
Play, 154-163 

Playgrounds, 95, 159, 161-162 
Police, 130-132, 230-231, 235-236 
Poor, 34-41 

Pope, 16-17, 24-25 61 224-227 
Prayer. 82, 84 -85, 153, i 98, 212-214 
Prayer for living and dead, 58-59, 
236-237 

Press, Catholic, 179-180 
Priesthood and priests, 170-171, 
220-223 
Prisons, 77-78 

Public health service, 29, 69, 71 
Purgatory, 213 
Purity. See Chastity 

Reclamation projects, 193-195 
Recreation. See Play 
Redemption, 199-201 
Reed, Walter, 20 

Religious Orders, 7-8, 25-26, 38, 
42-43, 59, 69, 71, 170 
Resurrection, 18-19 
Resurrection of body, 119 - 
Reverence, 208-218 
Roads, 43-44 
Room registries, 46 
Roosevelt, 12, 94, 121, 148, 155 

Safety First, 23, 31, 130 
St. Vincent de Paul Society, 36, 37, 
71 

Schools. See Education 
Sick, care of, 20-31, 64-65, 129 
Sin, actual, 201-204; original, 199- 
201 

Smoking, 122 
State. See Government 
Stranger, care of, 42-50 
Sunday observance, 154, 161 
Superstitions, 75-76, 214-215 


246 


PLAY FAIR 




Taxes, 101, 230-231, 237 
Teamwork, 66-71 
Temperance. See Drinking 
Temptation, 147-149, 153, 202-204 
Tolerance, 241-242 
Travelers’ Aid, 47 
Trinity, 115 
Trustworthiness, 80-86 
Truthfulness, 84-86, 195 

United States, population, 2; growth, 
2-5. See Government 


Universities, 178 

Vocation. See Work 
Vocational education, 176-178 

Wages, 112-113, 196-197. See In¬ 
dustry, Modern 

Washington, George, 4, 14-15, 28, 94 
Weather Bureau, 52-53, 71 
Weights and measures, 106-107 
Work, 164-176 

Works of Mercy, 20-79,159,166-171 



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